Competitive Analysis: Wix and Wordpress and Ease of Use
The A11yFirst CKEditor is seen on https://a11yfirst.library.illinois.edu/ separated from the wider context of whatever site uses its plugin, so this comparison will focus on the actual page editing functions of Wix and Wordpress’ current editors rather than the full sites.
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Wix
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Wix does not use a text editor like A11yFirst. Instead, sites are edited visually – you choose a template and go to it, and then from there you can add or remove pages, images, text boxes, and so on. Each time you click on a header with buttons, you get a message pop up asking if you’d like to make any changes:
If you’re creating a blog, you would add new posts like so:
This is the first place you start to see a text editor, but it’s very simple – there is no ability to change font, for example. In order to change font, you have to go back to the main page, click the post, click the design button, and then click design next to post body:
It’s not very hard to make a site that looks really good through Wix, but customizing it can be tricky.
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Wix is designed to be created and edited visually based on offered templates rather than verbally. From a usability perspective, this is really great since you don’t need to know anything at all about design to get something that looks really good. It is bad from a customization standpoint, which is an area where A11yFirst CKEditor also struggles. It is not necessarily bad from an accessibility standpoint as long as the original template is accessible – customizing is available but hard, so a default accessibility template would make for many more accessible designs in the world. Unfortunately, accessibility doesn’t seem to be a priority at Wix, so it is hard to evaluate the actual efficacy of that hypothetical. I think Wix’s controls are very different from what A11yFirst is going for but there’s a nugget of a really good idea here to create accessible templates, and this may be something A11yFirst wants to consider going forward. Things could be made harder to improve accessibility.
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Wordpress
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Wordpress is the site for which the A11yFirst plugin is being designed. Like Wix, Wordpress allows you to customize your theme with them. However, page edits are done very differently. I actually really struggled to set up a site template that I wanted – I somehow got onto a blog template and couldn’t figure out how to change it. I know millions of people use Wordpress without problem, but it not very usable out-of-the box in comparison to Wix – which is an aside to our discussion of the text editing plugin aspects of Wordpress.
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I eventually did figure out how to change my template and make news pages within it, and then I went to edit one of them.
This is where you get the text editor – and here is what you see:
You get all the same really basic functionality that you get in a program like Word. The add button allows for adding media, a contact form, or a payment button. Edits can also be made in HTML. If you press the three buttons on the right under HTML, you get advanced controls which include things like text color and indentations. The page settings buttons of the right allow for edits to the functionality of the page rather than the text. From a usability standpoint, this plugin is likely more usable than A11yFirst since it had all the functionality you’d expect from previous experience that a text editor should have. It is simple and clean and basic – no edits you’d want to make to the text are particularly hard to make. From an accessibility standpoint, it could gain a lot from our plugin since no accessibility controls are built in at all. Certain controls (like color) are hidden, but not very hidden. There is really no thought given to accessibility in this plugin. I think out major takeaway from Wordpress needs to be to simplify our controls (and potentially hide – though not too well- the less necessary of them.)