Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) are a layered rule-set that influence how designers and developers create a more accessible internet. Officially, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) set these guidelines as part of its mission to make the internet more accessible and inclusive.
A series of general rules, principles, and guidelines make up ATAG. ATAG is organized into two layers to make it more efficient for developers to sort through the deep composition of standards. The principles layer provides high-level organization as a rule-based starting point for setting objectives. The guidelines layer provides the framework for meeting objectives. From there, developers can compare their accessibility implementations to levels of success (A, AA, and AAA, with AAA being the most accessible).
ATAG is intended for developers working on specific products, mostly authoring tools. These can be tools such as HTML editors, content management systems (CMS), word processors that publish to the web, multimedia tools, and an array of social sharing tools like blogs, wikis, and photo sites. ATAG aims to enable developers to do their best to make these tools as accessible as possible.
