If you’re building or upgrading a learning management system, the rich text editor sitting inside your course authoring tool is more important than most product teams realize. It’s the interface instructors interact with every single day. It’s also where accessibility compliance, content quality, and user satisfaction either come together or fall apart.
This checklist covers the seven capabilities your editor needs to support instructors, meet institutional requirements, and keep your engineering team productive.
Key Takeaways
- WCAG 2.2 and Section 508 accessibility compliance built directly into the authoring tool is non-negotiable for federal funding and clean HTML output.
- Native support for mathematical equations and seamless multimedia embedding removes friction for STEM and interactive course creation.
- An automatic clean paste function is essential to strip bloated formatting from external documents and reduce support tickets.
- The editor must be fully functional on mobile devices and support real-time collaboration to match how modern instructional teams work.
- A flexible plugin architecture and open API ensure your engineering team can build custom tools and scale the platform as needs change.
1. WCAG 2.2 and Section 508 Compliance Built Into the Editor
Accessibility in EdTech is a requirement, not a feature request. Universities and K-12 districts receiving federal funding must comply with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, and most institutions now reference WCAG 2.2 Level AA as their baseline standard.
Your editor needs to support this at the authoring level. That means keyboard navigation through every toolbar element, proper ARIA labels on controls, and the ability to add alt text to images directly within the editing interface. If instructors create inaccessible content because the editor allows it, the compliance burden shifts to your platform.
Look for editors that generate semantic HTML output with proper heading hierarchies, list structures, and table markup. Clean output is the foundation of accessible content.
2. Math Equation and Scientific Notation Support
STEM courses need native math support. Instructors in calculus, physics, chemistry, and statistics courses write equations constantly. If your editor forces them to create equations elsewhere and paste them as images, you’ve added friction to every lesson they build.
The standard approach is MathType integration, which provides a visual equation editor that outputs MathML. This keeps equations accessible to screen readers and indexable for search. Some editors also support LaTeX input for instructors who prefer it.
A JavaScript HTML editor with MathType support lets instructors write and edit equations directly inside the same interface where they compose lesson text, reducing context-switching and speeding up course creation.
3. Multimedia Embedding and File Handling
Modern course content is more than text. Instructors embed YouTube videos, upload audio recordings, insert interactive simulations, and reference external resources. Your editor needs to handle all of this cleanly.
At minimum, the editor should support image uploads with drag-and-drop, video embedding via URL or iframe, and audio file insertion. The HTML output should use semantic media elements like <video>, <audio>, and <figure> with proper captioning attributes.
For platforms handling large volumes of student-uploaded media alongside instructor content, a dedicated file upload API can handle the storage, processing, and delivery layer so your editor stays focused on content creation.
4. Clean Paste from External Sources
Instructors copy content from Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and PDF viewers constantly. If your editor preserves the hidden formatting baggage from these sources, you end up with bloated HTML, broken styles, and inconsistent rendering across devices.
The editor should strip proprietary markup during paste while preserving intended formatting like headings, bold text, lists, and tables. This is commonly called “clean paste” or “paste from Word” functionality. The best WYSIWYG editors handle this automatically, converting pasted content to clean, semantic HTML that matches your platform’s stylesheet.
This single feature eliminates a significant volume of formatting-related support requests. More on that in the next point.
5. Mobile-Responsive Editing Interface
According to Statista’s research on mobile learning, the mobile education market continues to grow rapidly. Instructors increasingly work from tablets and phones, especially for quick edits, announcements, and discussion responses.
Your editor should render and function correctly on touch devices. This means responsive toolbar layouts, touch-friendly controls, and a content area that adapts to smaller screens. If the editing experience breaks on mobile, you’re limiting when and where instructors can create content.
Test the editor on actual devices during evaluation. Desktop preview modes are unreliable indicators of real mobile performance.
6. Real-Time Collaboration and Track Changes
Course content rarely comes from a single author. Department chairs review syllabi. Teaching assistants update lab instructions. Subject matter experts contribute to shared modules. The editor needs to support this workflow.
Real-time collaboration means multiple users editing the same document simultaneously with live cursor tracking and conflict resolution. Track changes means the ability to see who modified what, accept or reject individual changes, and maintain an audit trail.
These features are especially important for institutions with formal content review processes. When your content management editor supports collaborative workflows, you remove the need for external tools like Google Docs as intermediaries in the content creation pipeline.
7. Extensibility Through a Plugin Architecture and API
Your editor will need to do things the vendor hasn’t thought of yet. Maybe you need a custom rubric insertion tool, a branded template system, or integration with your assessment engine. A closed editor with a fixed feature set becomes a bottleneck.
Look for an editor with a documented plugin API, event hooks, and the ability to add custom toolbar buttons. The W3C’s Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) also recommend that authoring tools be extensible to support accessibility features specific to your content domain.
Your engineering team should be able to extend the editor’s functionality in hours, not weeks. Ask vendors for examples of custom plugin implementations during your evaluation process.
How to Use This Checklist
When evaluating editors, score each of these seven capabilities on a simple scale: fully supported, partially supported, or missing. Weight accessibility compliance and clean HTML output the highest, since these have the broadest impact on your platform’s compliance posture and content quality.
Request a technical trial before committing. Have your actual instructors create real course content in the editor. The gaps will surface quickly.
The right editor accelerates content creation, reduces support overhead, and keeps your platform compliant. The wrong one creates friction at the exact point where your users interact with your product the most.
