Using a CMS to Create Fully Accessible Websites
Sébastien Rainville-Pitt, Jean-Marie D'Amour · 2007 · Proceedings of the 2007 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A) · doi:10.1145/1243441.1243445
Summary
This demonstration paper presents Edimaster Plus, a content management system developed over five years by Netic Hypermedia Inc. in Quebec, Canada, designed from the ground up to generate fully accessible websites meeting all three WAI priority levels. The paper addresses a fundamental problem with most CMS platforms of the era: they do not generate standards-compliant or accessible code, and provide insufficient mechanisms for users to improve accessibility after the fact. The authors identify WYSIWYG editors as particularly problematic — while they meet users' desire for fast delivery of rich content, they tend to generate data that does not respect accessibility standards and whose semantic nature and structure are practically impossible to determine. Edimaster Plus takes a different architectural approach: rather than storing final HTML code in the database, it stores content along with metadata about its nature and structure, then generates accessible and valid XHTML code through a rendering filter. This separation means the code generation can be updated to adapt to new standards without losing content. The system uses pre-formatted fields that automatically apply correct semantic markup — entering a title in a designated field automatically generates proper h1-h6 heading tags, and the same pattern applies to images, dates, times, and navigation elements. Accessibility features like skip navigation links, jump-to-content functions, and new-window warnings are automatically added to hyperlinks and navigation bars.
Key findings
The key architectural innovation is the separation of content and semantic structure from final HTML output. By storing content with structural metadata rather than pre-rendered HTML, the CMS ensures that accessible code generation happens at the rendering stage rather than depending on authors to write correct markup. This approach solves the central tension in accessible CMS design: users want simple, fast content entry (the WYSIWYG promise) while accessibility requires semantically correct, standards-compliant output. Pre-formatted fields constrain content entry in ways that guarantee proper semantic markup without requiring authors to understand HTML or accessibility standards. The system was developed in collaboration with Jean-Marie D'Amour, an accessibility expert at the Institut Nazareth and Louis-Braille (Quebec's largest rehabilitation center for visual disabilities), who also served as consultant for the Quebec provincial government's web accessibility standard — ensuring the CMS was informed by both technical standards expertise and real-world assistive technology usage. The product was demonstrated at CSUN 2007, the largest assistive technology conference, using screen readers and screen magnifiers.
Relevance
This paper captures an important moment in the evolution of accessible content management — the recognition that CMS architecture fundamentally determines the accessibility of the websites it produces, and that retroactively fixing accessibility in a poorly designed CMS is insufficient. The content-structure separation pattern described here (storing semantic content rather than rendered HTML, with accessible code generated at output time) anticipated approaches now common in modern headless CMS and structured content platforms. The insight that pre-formatted fields can enforce accessible markup without burdening authors remains directly applicable to modern CMS template and component design. For accessibility practitioners evaluating or configuring CMS platforms today, the paper's core question endures: does this system make it easier to create accessible content than inaccessible content, or does it require authors to fight the tool to achieve accessibility? The collaboration between a CMS developer and a rehabilitation center accessibility expert also models the kind of cross-disciplinary partnership that produces genuinely accessible authoring tools.
Tags: web accessibility · content management systems · authoring tools · WCAG compliance · assistive technology · screen readers · accessible by default · semantic HTML
Standards referenced: WCAG 1.0 · XHTML