CKeditor WYSIWYG editor

We are happy to announce the release of the latest major CKEditor version. CKEditor 4.7 comes with plenty of new features - including Paste from Excel support, advanced table selection, improved conformance with Content Security Policy ... [More] , and further enhancements to the pasting process. In addition to that, some important changes were introduced to popular plugins such as Media Embed, Copy Formatting, and Mathematical Formulas. Read on for more! Advanced table selection Table support has always been an important feature for CKEditor users and with time (and also, with the number of issues that came from different browsers implementing table selection differently) we have decided to work on a custom implementation that would help us deliver an outstanding user experience when handling tables. Starting from CKEditor 4.7 you can now use the unique custom selection system for tables to, for example: Select an arbitrary rectangular table fragment - a few cells from different rows, a column (or a few of them) or a row (or multiple rows). Apply formatting or add a link to all selected cells at once. Cut, copy and paste entire rows or columns. Creating a custom selection system meant that we needed to rewrite some core editor parts to bring support for multiple ranges for tables (and only tables) and integrate it with clipboard to make sure that only the selected table fragment is copied or pasted. The new system was obviously integrated with the existing plugins such as Table Tools, styles or links.  Check out the table support sample in CKEditor SDK and read more in the documentation! Content Security Policy support CKEditor 4.7 brings improved compliance with CSP with the removal of dynamic evaluation calls in the template system. Thanks to this, the editor can now be used with unsafe-eval Content Security Policy. We would like to thank Caridy Patiño for proposing a solution to this challenge! Paste from Excel Thanks to some further enhancements in the Paste from Word plugin CKEditor is now able to reliably support basic Excel formatting, too. Styles such as table cell background color and height or font styles (color, family, weight, size etc.) will be copied to preserve the original Excel formatting. Check out the Paste from Excel sample in CKEditor SDK and read more in the documentation! Advanced Paste from Word updates Thanks to some enhancements in the Paste from Word plugin the editor is now able to retain formatting applied using Word’s defined style rules in all browsers that support clipboard data transfer. This lets the editor copy and paste inline styles that were previously shown in CKEditor as unformatted text. Last but not least, further updates to the paste engine were introduced to improve the editor behavior with pasting lists, whitespaces, images, paragraphs looking like lists and similar edge cases - which only shows the huge complexity of all scenarios that the Paste from Word feature needs to support in multiple environments and browsers. Check out the Paste from Word sample in CKEditor SDK and read more in the documentation! Mathematical Formulas CDN change The recommended MathJax CDN provider for the Mathematical Formulas plugin was switched from cdn.mathjax.org to cdnjs, due to the closing of cdn.mathjax.org scheduled for April 30, 2017. If you want to continue using the plugin, use the config.mathJaxLib configuration option to change the MathJax library path to another CDN or a locally hosted copy. More details here. Media Embed change The config.embed_provider configuration option for the Media Embed and Semantic Media Embed plugins is no longer preset by default - you will now need to set it manually when configuring the plugins. The ready-to-use provider URL is still available; however, it is most recommended to register a custom Iframely account to gain access to some features such as Google Maps API. More details here. Further paste improvements We have decided to simplify the user experience when pasting and said goodbye to the old paste dialog window. From now on, the editor behavior on pasting will be unified and the user will be prompted to paste the content using an appropriate keyboard shortcut when the browser blocks it due to security settings. Furthermore, a few other issues with Paste as Plain Text were fixed. Additionally, with recent Safari fixes it is finally possible to use enhanced clipboard API (introduced in CKEditor 4.5) also in this browser. This will result in improved HTML pasting experience, including the Paste from Word feature. Other new features and improvements Here is a short overview of some of the other important features and improvements introduced in this release: Spell Check As You Type (SCAYT) and Webspellchecker plugins were updated to their latest versions. A new config.enableContextMenu configuration option was added for enabling and disabling the context menu. Regardless of this setting, the Context Menu plugin is still loaded. Translations were updated thanks to the effort of the amazing community working through Transifex. Release notes Check out the release notes for the full list of changes. Download Download CKEditor now and upgrade your installation or use your favorite package manager to install it! License CKEditor is available under Open Source and Commercial licenses. Full details can be found on our license page. Reporting Issues and Contributing Please use the CKEditor Development website to report issues and suggestions through tickets. You can also contribute code and provide editor patches through pull requests. Support Community support is available through Stack Overflow. Visit the support page for additional options. Feedback Needed! We are really enthusiastic about this new, major CKEditor version and its numerous new features. We will be happy to hear from you and thankful for any suggestions that will help us improve these features and tailor them to your expectations. Toll-free (US/CAN): +1 800 820 4009Internationally: +1 650 521 9065 [Less]

We are happy to announce the release of CKEditor 4.6.2. Despite being a "minor" release, this editor version introduces two important features: a new default color palette for the color selector and yet another editor localization — ... [More] Azerbaijani. Read on for more information! New Color Button palette Our first release in 2017 introduces a brand new color palette for the Color Button feature which provides the Text and Background Color formatting. The new selection of colors is inspired by Google's material design guidelines. We hope that this new set of colors will improve the look of content created in CKEditor and will corespond with modern web design standards. From now on you can also use the config.colorButton_colorsPerRow configuration option that lets you set up the number of colors per row displayed in the Color Button drop-down menu. New localization: Azerbaijani Thanks to the work of our traslators, Azerbaijani becomes the 69th localization available for CKEditor. We'd like to whole-heartedly thank the entire Azerbaijani language team for their incredible effort! If you would like to help provide the 70th official localization for CKEditor (or update any of the existing ones), do not hesitate to join us at the CKEditor UI Translation Center at Transifex! CKEditor fixes In addition to that, this editor release also makes it possible to group widget style definitions, so from now on applying one style can disable the other. CKEditor 4.6.2 also brings improvements to the Paste from Word and Copy Formatting features that were the highlight of the last major editor release. Last but not least, this editor version brings a few browser-specific bug fixes and usability improvements. Release notes Check out the release notes for the full list of changes. Download Download CKEditor now and upgrade your installation or use your favorite package manager to install it! License CKEditor is available under Open Source and Commercial licenses. Full details can be found on our license page. Reporting issues and contributing Please use the CKEditor Development website to report issues and suggestions through tickets. You can also contribute code and provide editor patches through pull requests. Support Community support is available through Stack Overflow. Visit the support page for additional options. Toll-free (US/CAN): +1 800 820 4009Internationally: +1 650 521 9065 [Less]

We are happy to announce the release of CKEditor 4.6.1. This is the first minor release that follows the well-received CKEditor 4.6 and contains some bug fixes, including a noteworthy improvement in the Color Button plugin. Read on for ... [More] more information! CKEditor fixes CKEditor 4.6.1 brings improvements to the Color Button plugin which provides the Text and Background Color formatting. The plugin will now normalize the CSS background property if it only contains a color value. This fixes missing background colors when using the newly rewritten Paste from Word feature. The generic fix in the Color Button plugin will, however, apply to more use cases than only those releated to pasting content from Microsoft Word. This minor release also gets rid of the issue connected to selecting all content when a widget or a non-editable element is its first or last element (fixed in the Select All plugin as well) and other small issues related to CKEditor usability. Release notes Check out the release notes for the full list of changes. Download Download CKEditor now and upgrade your installation or use your favorite package manager to install it! License CKEditor is available under Open Source and Commercial licenses. Full details can be found on our license page. Reporting issues and contributing Please use the CKEditor Development website to report issues and suggestions through tickets. You can also contribute code and provide editor patches through pull requests. Support Community support is available through Stack Overflow. Visit the support page for additional options. Toll-free (US/CAN): +1 800 820 4009Internationally: +1 650 521 9065 [Less]

We are happy to announce that the most awaited major CKEditor version has just been officially released. CKEditor 4.6 is packed with new features such as a new default skin and updated UI, completely rewritten Paste from Word, new Copy ... [More] Formatting, Upload File and Balloon Panel plugins, Occitan localization as well as some widget and accessibility improvements. Read on for more details! New default skin CKEditor 4.6 got some serious UI refresh with a new default skin and the resulting changes in the dialog windows and toolbar. Moono-Lisa is a modern, flat skin in neutral colors and a successor of the previous Moono skin. Fun fact: The name of the new skin is, obviously, a tribute to the famous Leonardo da Vinci’s work as well as a combination of the Moono name and the Spanish word lisa (flat, smooth). All three official CKEditor 4 skins will be maintained in the future, so if you would like to continue using Moono, just use the online builder to create a CKEditor package with your preferred skin. Copy Formatting feature The optional Copy Formatting plugin (included in the Full package) provides the ability to easily copy inline text formatting from one place in the document and apply it to another. By default it allows to copy plain text, list and table formatting and is prepared to handle some pretty complex scenarios like nested lists or heavily styled tables. In case of lists, for example, it is even able to change the list type or start value, so applying formatting from a bulleted list to a numbered one will effectively change the list type from numbered to bulleted. This feature comes with great accessibility support and is highly customizable. Thanks to a handful of configuration options available you are able to limit the context (formatting type) and define your own rules to whitelist and blacklist copying formatting from particular elements. See the Copy Formatting sample and refer to the Using the Copy Formatting documentation to learn more about this feature. Advanced Paste from Word Pasting from Word is, in general, as tricky as it can get. With plenty of possible combinations of Microsoft Word, operating system and browser versions Word output that comes through clipboard to CKEditor can significantly differ. This makes it extremely hard to support some of the more complicated content formatting cases that include text, images, lists, tables, nested objects, plenty of colors, styles and so on. CKEditor has always been a market leader in parsing Word content and transforming it to valid HTML, but handling some of the more complex cases and working around vendor bugs takes a lot of time, effort and experience. With some new tools available, such as Advanced Content Filter or Clipboard API, we have decided to rewrite the Paste from Word feature from scratch. Here are some areas where the new, Advanced Paste from Word really shines: Preservation of list numbering, styling and indentation (for example, nested lists with multiple levels, with different styling or custom list markers). Document structure parsing that fixes plenty of issues with distorted or missing content after paste. Smarter inline formatting, including preserving text or background color. Handling hotlinked images. Tight integration with Advanced Content Filter to efficiently adjust formatting coming from Word to what is allowed in a particular editor configuration. Clean and valid HTML markup. Note: Some Paste from Word configuration options were either dropped or changed their default values. Please refer to the release notes for more details. Improved keyboard shortcuts visibility CKEditor has always had great keyboard support, but up till now one needed to either open the Accessibility Instructions dialog or refer to documentation to learn about the supported keyboard shortcuts. Starting from CKEditor 4.6 available keyboard shortcuts will be displayed in toolbar button tooltips and context menu entries. The system is very efficient — if you change the default keyboard shortcut assigned to some editor functionality, the labels displayed to the users will reflect this. Additionally, the labels adjust to the user operating system so, for example, on Mac OS you will see the Command (⌘) symbol instead of Ctrl. New plugins CKEditor 4.6 introduces two more optional plugins — Upload File and Balloon Panel. Upload File is a simple plugin that allows you to drag&drop a file into the editor. The editor will then automatically send the file to your pre-configured backend and convert it into a link. Balloon Panel provides the ability to create a floating, balloon-shaped UI container capable of presenting content at a precise position in the document. It is used in Accessibility Checker to create the floating panels with accessibility tips. Other new features and improvements Here is a short overview of some of the other important features and improvements introduced in this release. Occitan localization Thanks to the great effort of Cédric Valmary, Occitan is now available as the 68th official CKEditor localization. Plenty of localization updates have also been provided through the CKEditor UI Translation Center and we would like to, once again, extend our heartfelt thanks to the entire fantastic community of CKEditor translators! Widget improvements Widget wrappers will get the cke_widget_ classes by default. Also, any class applied to the widget element will now be reflected in its wrapper (with a proper prefix), too. This will allow you to style widget wrappers and achieve certain styling results that have not been possible before. Additionally, a few sample widget styles were added to the styles.js file and a new Widget Styles sample showcasing them is now available in CKEditor SDK. File upload improvements A new additionalRequestParameters property was introduced to make it possible to send additional information about the uploaded file to the server. Also, the server response received when uploading files will now be more flexible which means that e.g. the server will be able to dictate the size of the uploaded image. Forcing download for links Thanks to sbusse CKEditor now supports the HTML5 download attribute in link elements. Selecting the "Force Download" checkbox in the Link dialog will cause the linked file to be downloaded automatically. Making alternative text mandatory for images Thanks to Andrey Fedoseev CKEditor now has a new config.image2_altRequired configuration option for the Enhanced Image plugin to allow making alternative text a mandatory field. Release notes Check out the release notes for the full list of changes. More Info and Download See the CKEditor 4.6 release blog post for more detailed information about the new version. You can download the latest release here. Toll-free (US/CAN): +1 800 820 4009Internationally: +1 650 521 9065 [Less]

We are happy to announce that CKFinder 3.4 for both PHP and ASP.NET was released today. This is the next major release for the new CKFinder 3 line that introduces a lot of new features (especially for ASP.NET), two new localizations and ... [More] several performance and user experience related improvements. Alongside this release, CKFinder provides also a Symfony 3 bundle for easier integration in your projects. Read on to see what else this new CKFinder version has to offer! User Experience Improvements This release comes up with several user experience improvements. These include adding the Compact View for displaying files in columns (not supported in IE9), adding "OK" button to information dialogs, fixed focus in settings panel when changing view type, fixed keyboard navigation for disabled context menu items and fixed drag & drop uploads on List View. New features in CKFinder for ASP.NET We have added a lot of new features to the ASP.NET connector. These include progress tracking for time-consuming operations (with a progress bar letting you know how long will it take to finish your current operation) and improved thumbnail caching (which puts less pressure on the server). We hope that these two changes will make your everyday work with numerous files less tedious. We have also added support for IIS virtual directories in local storage adapter. Localizations CKFinder 3.4 includes two new localizations: Swiss German and Ukrainian. We also updated the following localizations: Chinese, Czech, Esperanto, French, German, Kurdish, Latvian, Polish, Russian, Slovakian, Spanish and Turkish. Changelog See the What’s New? page for a full list of changes. Download Download CKFinder now! Also available as a Symfony Bundle. Reporting Issues and Feature Requests If you miss anything in CKFinder, have ideas on how CKFinder could be improved, or found a bug, please do not hesitate to report an issue in the CKFinder issue tracker. The tracker is public, so not only can you submit your ideas, but you can also browse existing issues and add your comments there. Support All CKFinder licenses come with a year of dedicated support straight from core CKFinder developers. You can also refer to StackOverflow for community support. Toll-free (US/CAN): +1 800 820 4009Internationally: +1 650 521 9065 [Less]

We are happy to announce the release of CKEditor 4.5.11. Although it is a minor release, it contains two new features (including a long overdue one!) and some important bug fixes, like a fix for image pasting in Microsoft Edge. Read on ... [More] for more information! Link Plugin Improvements: Display Text Thanks to Ryan Guill, since version 4.5.11 it will now be possible to specify the text displayed within the link. The new Display Text field added to the Link plugin dialog allows the user to provide or modify the text that is linked. What's interesting is that this new feature works on multiple elements, too! As a matter of fact, this feature seems to have been badly missed since a long time and it is another amazing example of the community stepping in when some editor improvement somehow goes off the radar of the core team. Thanks again, Ryan! Enhanced Image Plugin Improvement: Target Attribute The Enhanced Image plugin that lets you create captioned image widgets also got a small improvement: from now it will have support for the link target attribute. You can now use the Target tab of the Link dialog to set the image to, for example, open its link in a new window or tab. CKEditor Fixes In addition to these new features, this release also contains a few important bug fixes. Pasting images directly from clipboard will now finally work in Microsoft Edge, too. Additionally, an annoying bug where closing a dialog in a -based editor would cause the content to be scrolled in Blink-based browsers was fixed. Last but not least, another issue with unwanted scrolling in Edge when focusing the editor was also corrected. Security Fix We have fixed a minor security issue - a target="_blank" vulnerability reported by James Gaskell (a BIG thank you!).  If a victim had access to a spoofed version of ckeditor.com via HTTP (e.g. due to DNS spoofing, using a hacked public network or malicious hotspot), then when using a link to the ckeditor.com website it was possible for the attacker to change the current URL of the opening page, even if the opening page was protected with SSL. An upgrade is recommended. Changelog Check out the What's New? page for the full list of changes. More Info and Download See the CKEditor 4.5.11 release blog post for more detailed information about the new version. You can download the latest release here. Toll-free (US/CAN): +1 800 820 4009Internationally: +1 650 521 9065 [Less]

We are happy to announce the release of CKEditor 4.5.10. This is a minor release that includes some bug fixes, including one significant improvement for using custom fonts with names containing characters such as quotes or ... [More] whitespace. Read on for more information! Font Name Fixes Up till version 4.5.9 the editor did not properly escape font names using such characters as multiple whitespaces or quotes. As a result, such font names were handled incorrectly in the Font Family drop-down. This, however, is no longer the case, so if you feel like using a font with a name containing quotes, multiple whitespaces, special characters or Unicode symbols — or you want to use the config.font_names option to give a font a fancy name - feel free to do so now! Our example uses the Pacifico font by Vernon Adams, renamed to a custom name in the Font Family drop-down. Other CKEditor Fixes Apart from the font name fix, this editor version also brings further accessibility improvements for widgets. The Enhanced Image and Placeholder widgets got more precise labels which are now read correctly by JAWS when the screen reader encounters a widget. A minor fix was also added for the Auto Grow plugin working with the config.autoGrow_onStartup option set to true, and some specific issues with Internet Explorer were also corrected. In addition to this, CKEditor 4.5.10 includes some community contributions. Jakub Chalupa fixed an issue with numeric element IDs not being escaped properly, causing widgets to crash, and David Pidcock fixed a bug with HtmlWriter adding an extra line break after an inline tag was inserted into the editor. Thank you for your help! Changelog Check out the What's New? page for the full list of changes. More Info and Download See the CKEditor 4.5.10 release blog post for more detailed information about the new version. You can download the latest release here. Toll-free (US/CAN): +1 800 820 4009Internationally: +1 650 521 9065 [Less]

"It all started in 2003. The decision of bringing my pet project into the open — to an environment I was still unfamiliar with. In a period when Open Source Software wasn’t yet a fashionable thing to do in order to show that you’re ... [More] cool." Find out more from this article on Medium, written by CKEditor Project Lead and owner of CKSource, Frederico Knabben.   Toll-free (US/CAN): +1 800 820 4009Internationally: +1 650 521 9065 [Less]

It's Global Accessibility Awareness Day today! To celebrate it in a big way, we would like to announce that as of today, Accessibility Checker for CKEditor will be available also under an Open Source GPL license. If you care about ... [More] accessibility, want to learn more about how important it is, and get to know our new product, read on! The Story Accessibility support has always been a priority issue at CKSource. CKEditor complies with most important industry standards, recommendations and checklists plus it includes a number of features that make it easy to use with assistive technologies. Last year we decided to give our dedication to web accessibility a big boost and entered the market with Accessibility Checker - an innovative tool that enables you to check your content for accessibility issues and fix them before you go live.​ Thanks to a succesful cooperation with the Government of Netherlands and Quail, and enthusiastic feedback from our customers - corporations, education institutions, government bodies - we feel that the product is fully functional and fulfills its primary purpose, which is making web content created in CKEditor fully accessible. Bearing all that in mind, we are happy to let you know that CKSource Accessibility Checker will also become available under an Open Source, GPL license as of today! This is no accident that we decide to share this news today (May 19th, 2016) which marks the Global Accessibility Awareness Day! We are glad that we can contribute to this initiative in a way, which gives you a tool to inspect your content for accessibility issues and correct them on the go. The Features Accessibility Checker is an innovative, award winning solution that lets you inspect the accessibility level of content created in CKEditor and immediately solve any accessibility issues that are found. It is built upon three key elements: User Interface optimized for quick problem solving. Flexibility allowing you to use the accessibility checking engine of your choice. Quick Fix feature letting you fix common problems fully automatically. By default, it uses Quail as its accessibility tests library, but you can integrate any other similar library to achieve comparable results. When the Accessibility Checker plugin is enabled, the "Check Accessibility"  button () is automatically added to the toolbar. Once clicked, it starts checking your content for accessibility issues as defined in the tests library. All issues become highlighted and the Accessibility Checker panel will let you not only navigate through them, but also fix them as you go. Thanks to the Quick Fix feature you can correct common problems directly in the panel, sometimes with just one click of a button! The Resources Check the following to learn more about Accessibility Checker: Accessibility Checker website Accessibility Checker SDK sample, with source code ready to use Accessibility Checker documentation Accessibility Checker entry in the Add-ons Repository to create an installation package You can read more on the topic of Web Accessibility in our blog posts: If You're not Thinking About Accessibility - a Talk with Marcy Sutton,  Accessibility Engineer for Adobe 5 Tips on How to Improve Accessibility When Creating Your Web Content in a WYSIWYG Editor Commercial Benefits of Accessibility Accessibility, Usability and SEO Go Hand in Hand - a talk with David Carralon, Head of International SEO for Career Builder The Technology We Use Shouldn’t Limit Us from Finding a Connection - a talk with Jesse Beach, senior front end developer at Facebook and creator of Quail The Installation The recommended method to install Accessibility Checker is through CKBuilder. Add Accessibility Checker to your editor build and the builder will automatically resolve any dependencies for you. Please note that Quail, the default accessibility tests library, requires jQuery 1.x or later to run. You thus need to add jQuery 1.x to any site that is going to use Accessibility Checker. The License Accessibility Checker is available under a GPL or a commercial license. Please note that when you add Accessibility Checker to your CKEditor package, the GPL license becomes binding for the entire CKEditor package. If you would like to support the development of Accessibility Checker and/or want to use it in a commercial environment, you are most welcome to purchase a commercial license - just contact us. Your help would be appreciated! The Feedback! We are extremely proud of our latest product and very happy to share it with the fantastic CKEditor community and our customers that have always supported us throughout the 13 years we are on the market. Accessibility is an important aspect of modern Web that we strongly believe in - we hope that you will be able to use Accessibility Checker to empower your users and open your content to a much wider audience. It has never been easier than now! We will be most happy to hear from you - download Accessibility Checker, use it, share the news with the world and let us know what you think! Toll-free (US/CAN): +1 800 820 4009Internationally: +1 650 521 9065 [Less]

Jesse Beach is a senior front end developer and a specialist in web accessibility. She currently works at Facebook on building web accessibility testing tools and improving the accessibility of Facebook's user interface. In this talk we ... [More] focus on her rich experience in "driving accessibility as a requirement" within various large and medium organisations and talk about how open source is the driving factor behind innovation in web accessibility technologies. Read on for more! When I went through your online profile the first thing that grabbed my attention (besides your rich professional portfolio) was your short introduction: “I believe in information. It reifies our human experience”. I’ve also noticed that you’ve been initially studying linguistics in Germany, China, France to end up as a developer focused on web accessibility. What’s the common denominator between all these life experiences if you could draw one? I think it comes down to empathy and compassion. When you study languages and the human capacity for speech and expression, it becomes very evident that we are always concerned with the same struggles and topics. I was taking historical linguistics classes when I was studying and noticed how people in the past had the words for things that we care about today like family, relations, food, activities etc. Understanding that (despite surface differences) there is a universality to the human experience and thinking about these differences in terms of the abilities of individual humans is key to realizing that underneath it all we’re all looking for connection. The technology we use shouldn’t limit us from finding that connection. You’ve worked in companies of various sizes - ranging from small to medium. You’ve been your own boss, but you’ve also been working for the big players such as Oracle, Acquia and now Facebook. These companies have different approach to web accessibility. Judging by your experience - what are the best practices towards web accessibility within a company, no matter its size and structure? Every business has this tension: first of all it has to make money to survive. I understand that every business fights this struggle to allocate resources as efficiently as possible to build a product and sell it at a margin that allows you to pay the people that work for you and to do more. Often our technology makes it easier to produce something for the majority and increase the margin of profit. That's one of the two reasons that (when we think about accessibility) the focus within an organization often falls short of the expected result. So one of the reasons is money and the other is just education. If your developers, designers and product managers understand how to address the means of the non-majority population in their user base (and to do so quickly at a low cost), then I think they’re more likely to build that into their process, than if they don’t understand how to accommodate and build for these particular interaction styles. It really comes down to the knowledge and the amount of resources that a particular business has to put in place. I’m very much a pragmatist when it comes to accessibility. In the same way that I don't know how to write a driver for a particular piece of hardware, I don’t expect every product engineer in an organization to understand how to address accessibility needs. That’s just the reality of the world we live in - people specialise. It’s our responsibility to make accessibility support so easy and automatic that we don’t have to train specialists - we just get it for free in the same way you get rounded corners in CSS by using border radius. Accessibility needs to become that easy and automatic, then we’ll see it taken up and provided for at web scales - not just by companies that can afford to do it because they’re making the margins. You’ve been responsible for “driving accessibility as a requirement for all front end development in Drupal core”. What are the lessons learned in making web accessibility a priority in such a large scale project as Drupal 8? I think Drupal did an excellent job in considering accessibility. Our community just understood that it had to be addressed and considered throughout the process. I was never told by anyone in the Drupal community that we would get to accessibility when the project was nearing completion or when we solve any other big problem. It was simply considered a big problem to solve throughout the development cycle. For other projects I would simply counsel that accessibility would be presented as a gating concern. You don’t release the product unless you’ve addressed the gaping holes in accessibility support in your core infrastructure and your ecosystem. I’ve been introduced to your work by the way of Quail - the accessibility checking engine that resides inside our Accessibility Checker. Could you briefly tell me how the whole project started, were there any breakthrough moments and what is the future of Quail? I met Fred (CKSource CEO and CKEditor project lead) in Prague in 2013 - the year we had the DrupalCon there. Back then we had incorporated a different in-place editor into Drupal core and the project wasn’t as fast as we wanted. I had spent some time ripping it out of core. We eventually settled on CKEditor as the best WYSIWYG editor to ship with our core product. It was the first time Drupal shipped a sanctioned WYSIWYG editor. That relationship brought together the inclusion of Quail into Accessibility Checker for CKEditor. At the time Quail was one of the few open source accessibility checking platforms with the architecture that was capable of being included inside of CKEditor. I’ve spent 2015 completely refactoring the basic infrastructure and releasing version 3, so now Quail is built using Babel, which means we can write in ECMAScript 7 (depending on the modules). I refactored the infrastructure to use a modular architecture, so we can pull in pieces of code to Quail at the build time in a way that wasn’t possible previously. The architecture of Quail represents what I think we need to move towards in the general open source space for accessibility conformance testing. There are other projects like aXe that I think are moving in the right direction. I think we’re moving towards a space where we have a common test pattern, which we can include in various platforms. I want Quail to be a kind of a model for these various open source projects and the way we can build a contribution space (much like the Drupal module contribution space) for building conformance tests that can run on any particular platform. You’re currently working at Facebook and I can see that your accessibility team is taking it to a whole another level. In 2015 we could read about your plans to create a tool that can enable the blind ‘see images’ on Facebook. One of the Facebook Accessibility  updates mentions your Teach Access initiative, which is all about raising awareness about the understanding of basic accessibility issues, concepts and best practices. What’s the future of web accessibility according to Facebook and why it’s such a priority to a company which already has more than 1.6 billion active users per month? The core mission of Facebook is to make the world more open and connected and it’s impossible to connect the 7.5 billion people in the world unless we’re also connecting those people with disabilities. If our product doesn’t meet the needs of people with various disabilities then we will fail on our mission. Therefore it’s a top priority at Facebook to support accessibility. When it comes down to it at Facebook’s scale there are tens of millions of members that have vision impairments - from impaired vision to blindness. We also consider hearing disabilities and tactile disabilities. The human range of ability is fairly wide and our mission is to address all human connection. The Accessibility team at Facebook is a part of core Facebook mission. We’re working with the biggest teams in the company to make sure that our flagship products are there for everyone. I know you've been attending CSUN Technology and Disability Conference in San Diego where you were one of the panelists speaking about Open Source and Accessibility. If you could enumerate just a couple of trends or issues that will shape the future of Web Accessibility, what would these be? The major trend that I picked up at CSUN is that web accessibility is becoming a mainstream concern amongst front-end developers. The number of attendees that I’ve met who are working in engineering departments and not in policy or QA or legal departments really struck me. I have a feeling that there are a number of developers who think about accessibility from the engineering standpoint. It feels to me like we’re reaching a critical mass of folks who are going to start creating solutions - the third wave of web accessibility. Other trends I’m noticing is that large companies like i.e. Google (who had introduced one of the most interesting product reveals during CSUN) are really investing in web accessibility. That is really encouraging. The focus is shifting towards innovation, rather than simply meeting the guidelines and conforming to legislations. Something like automatic alt text on images is a vastly different approach than simply making a webpage accessible to a screen reader. Don’t get me wrong - that’s an important thing to do too - however when you’re talking about a billion photos uploaded per day, we’ll never get human beings to write captions for all these images. We have to start thinking about these problems in terms of scales of millions and that requires a different approach to the problem. You can read more on the topic of Web Accessibility in our If You're not Thinking About Accessibility, 5 Tips on How to Improve Accessibility When Creating Your Web Content in a WYSIWYG Editor, Commercial Benefits of Accessibility and Accessibility, usability and SEO go hand in hand blog posts. In order to save your time and make sure that you implement proper accessibility standards on your website, we have created the Accessibility Checker - the first tool that enables you to check your content for accessibility issues and fix them before you go live.​ It is built upon three key elements: U​ser interface​ optimized for quick problem solving Flexibility allowing you to use the accessibility checking engine of your choice Q​uick Fix feature ​allowing you to eliminate common problems fully automatically Toll-free (US/CAN): +1 800 820 4009Internationally: +1 650 521 9065 [Less]