Thursday 29 January 2009

SharePoint Accessibility Resources

It has been a while since I have posted anything; this is mainly because I have been extremely busy and lack of personal time...
I found the following resource on SharePoint Accessibility extremely useful. This is taken from Sanjay Narang's blog....

"I've been working on implementing accessibility requirements for a public facing site on MOSS. Though keywords such as "SharePoint accessibility" provide a number of results on Live Search or any other engine, I had difficult time in searching the appropriate resources. Thought it would be worthwhile sharing the resources that I found and providing a context around them. Here are these resources:

Microsoft's Statements/Papers on SharePoint Accessibility
We have couple of white papers and articles on this topic, however, search engines are yet to rank them better to come towards the top. Here are these:

Article: Accessibility features (as provided by Office Online)
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/CH100948721033.aspx



Blog: Improvements in accessibility – Blog entry on SharePoint Team blog by Lawrence Liu. Though it's pretty old entry (April 2006) and was written for pre RTM version, but you can find a good summary of new and improved accessibility features. Most of this holds for RTM also. The blog groups the improvement areas in categories such as Headings, Navigation, Keyboard, Graphics, High Contrast – Low Vision, HTML Controls and also relates them to specific checkpoints from WCAG 1.0
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2006/04/24/improvements-in-accessibility.aspx



Whitepaper: Deliver accessible solutions by using Office SharePoint Server - This downloadable white paper provides information and guidelines about the issues that organizations face when delivering Web solutions, including those built by using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 that are accessible to people with disabilities. It's a pretty good paper to read when you are starting your journey on accessibility. It describes the available out-of-the-box (OOB) accessibility features in MOSS 2007 and also provides a very good summary on Accessibility Kit for SharePoint (AKS). If you want to know all about AKS in 4 pages, this is the article to read. However, if you are looking for best practices or implementation approaches – you need to look for a different paper. Have a look at the next one
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc668367.aspx



Whitepaper: Best practices for developing accessible Web sites - This downloadable white paper provides information about designing and developing accessible Web sites in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. If you are looking for implementation best practices that you couldn't find in the white paper listed above, this is a very useful resource. In this paper, Waldek Mastykarz, provides tips and techniques that are categorized in different areas such as General (HTML, javascript), .Net, MOSS, and IIS. You'll find tips such as appropriate MIME type, things to ensure while writing custom controls e.g. use Render method RenderControl
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc716527.aspx

Other Resources
Blog: SharePoint Accessibility - Is MOSS 2007 accessible? – Provides a quick comparison of SPS 2003 and MOSS 2007 with Priority 1 requirements
http://www.21apps.com/sharepoint/sharepoint-accessibility-is-moss-2007-accessible/



Article: Building ASP.NET 2.0 Web Sites Using Web Standards - Though, this article provides the best practices for ASP.net in general, it is very useful from SharePoint perspective for developing custom web parts, field controls, web controls and user controls. The article provides the basic knowledge of mechanisms available within the ASP.NET 2.0 platform which support developing accessible web sites. This contains a lot of examples that would be useful for people who are new to accessibility. The techniques provided here would be mostly used while writing the "Render" or "CreateChildControls" methods. For example, you'll find this tip from this paper: "Provide an AssociatedControlId property when declaring an ASP.NET Label controls, so that the control renders a