Unfortunately the underlying technology used in most WYSIWYG editors makes it very easy to fall foul of these accessibility rules. The problem is the Indent button. It works fine if you use it on a list - making the list item that you’ve highlighted move in a level - but if you apply it to a paragraph then it will mark it up as a quote. That’s because the normal styling applied to a quote by your browser is to indent the text.

The relevant WCAG 1 checkpoint is:
3.7 Mark up quotations. Do not use quotation markup for formatting effects such as indentation.
It’s a Priority 2 requirement, so is necessary for Double-A compliance.
Don’t indent with <blockquote>
So the first thing is probably to put some test content into your WYSIWYG editor and try the Indent button. Then look at the HTML code produced to see if it uses <blockquote>. If that is …

The designers of your website would want you to avoid having to be involved with any of the issues here, since it will mean that you are breaking away from the options in the stylesheets. In general, the more you use mark up to reflect the meaning and structure of your content the better. That makes it easier to maintain over a long period of time, to provide a common user experience across the site and to adapt to changes in the overall look and feel.

The reality is that there are times when you can’t avoid it - have deadlines to meet and you know that the stylesheet won’t be amended in time. So these are the WCAG 1 checkpoints that you need to be aware of.
Colour
A Priority 1 requirement is:
2.1 Ensure that all information conveyed with color is also available without color, for example from context or markup.
You’ll have …

There are two checkpoints in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1 (WCAG 1) directly covering links:
10.1 Until user agents allow users to turn off spawned windows, do not cause pop-ups or other windows to appear and do not change the current window without informing the user.

13.1 Clearly identify the target of each link.
Both of them are Priority 2, so you need to abide by them to meet Double-A compliance.
Making the links clear
Sighted users are able to scan through content and pick up the links by visual clues without having to wait for the content to be read out to them. The idea behind the second checkpoint is to help some screen readers that try to achieve the same result by extracting a list of all the links on a page. However since they are no longer in their original context then it is possible that they might not make …

This section isn’t going to set many normal pulses racing. Thankfully once you’re in the swing of things you’re only going to need to remember to validate your pages occasionally. You just need to be aware of the options in your editor that produce incorrect code and the perils of casually pasting in content from other programs.
The relevant main checkpoints from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are:
3.2 Create documents that validate to published formal grammars.

11.2 Avoid deprecated features of W3C technologies.
Both of them are Priority 2, so are required to meet the Double-A standard.

You’ll probably get to hear much more about web standards over the course of your Internet life. The purpose here is to make use of one of the basic tenets of the standards evangelists - more people can see and use more websites if we all use common points of reference. The second checkpoint …

Peter Krantz over at “Standards Schmandards” has given a range of WYSIWYG editors an annual work-out and posted his results.

It’s nice to see that a couple of the WYSIWYG developer teams (for TinyMCE and WYMeditor) have responded in the comments, and are taking the issues on board. Hopefully pressure can continue to be applied so that in future we don’t have to battle with the rich text editors to produce accessible content.

Note that he’s not testing it against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1 (WCAG 1), nor looking at whether the editor itself is accessible. Essentially he’s trying the sort of content that we (as web developers) would would want our clients entering into their assorted content systems. So anything that relates to look and feel (colours, text alignment, etc.) would all be provided by the stylesheets rather than the WYSIWYG …

I have to confess that Yahoo is not one of my usual haunts so I missed this excellent article the first time around - Graded Browser Support. It’s a very clear articulation & formalisation of something that many of us have been thinking about & trying to implement.

Essentially the idea is that you have (at least) 3 grades of web browser:

an identified list of browsers (+ operating system) that will take full advantage of the capabilities of modern browsers and will be tested thoroughly (grade A)
an identified list of browsers that will be able to access core functionality & content, but will only have a representative sample tested (grade C)
the rest that will either take conform to current web standards like the grade A browsers or be able to function at the minimum level of the grade C, however there is no testing and no support (grade X)

Which browser …

There’s a buzz in the web developer community over the new Yahoo! Pipes service - it’s been flagged up on O’Reilly Radar and Read/Write Web. It’s not as pretty as GoogleMaps but more significant in what it can allow you to do.

As the name suggests it is more to do with the plumbing behind the scenes than enhancing the user experience. However there are many exciting possibilities that it opens up - bringing content together from disparate websites and then combining them until you have something that could be feed into your own site.

The idea is borrowed from the pipes and filters functionality offered in Unix - take the information coming out of one process and feed it into another. Yahoo! Pipes applies that paradigm to the Internet. You start off …

I’ve been keeping my eye on the figures showing the breakdown in browser market share on TheCounter.com. When I wrote in December Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) had just overtaken the combined versions of Firefox with 12% of users. Another two months have gone by and now in the figures for February it’s risen to 24% with the corresponding reduction being made for IE6 (down from 70% to 59%). The other browsers have remained more or less static - Firefox on 11-12%, Safari on 3% & IE5 on 1%.

Microsoft were reporting a higher market share a month ago (25% across all websites in the US compared to TheCounter.com’s 20%) as they notched up the 100 millionth IE7 installation. Given the vagaries of web statistics …