sharepoint 2007 and Accessibility
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Last Thursday 29 November, I attended a seminar where someone held a presentation on MOSS 2007 in relation to the Dutch Web Guidelines. This is a quality model that includes compliance with WCAG 1.0, HTML, CSS etc.
The guy who gave the presentation, Waldek Mastykarz , is developing a toolkit for support of accessibility (and of syntactically and semantically correct application of web standards!) in SharePoint 2007.
He wrote an article about his presentation and another one on his toolkit on sharepointblogs.com. His toolkit isn't ready yet, but it looks real promising. In my opinion, he's doing what Microsoft itself should have been doing before releasing the application.
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I've done some hands-on work with MOSS and I must say I'm really disappointed:
I wrote down my thoughts in two consecutive articles:
Sharepoint 2007 from a interface developers view: http://friendlybit.com/...
Default HTML in Sharepoint 2007: http://friendlybit.com/...
Even though both articles aim more at the technical aspects, I still think one important conclusion is important for accessibility: MOSS is very hard to customize. This means that if you find a problem, you will have to work very hard to fix it. In most projects, you do an accessibility test and then fix the problems you find, in MOSS project you can't be certain that you can fix the problems you find...
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Hello Emil, welcome to the forum. I remember reading Friendly Bit a year or two ago...the FIFA tournament markup challenge ring any bells? 
I've recently stumbled into a couple of Sharepoint and ASP.NET sites. They are like a giant leap backwards in terms of markup quality. Having said that, it seems every CMS apart from a couple of blogging platforms requires extensive reconfiguration to even make good markup possible. Once the configuration is done they turn out nice, though.
How is accessibility and standards compliance supposed to become mainstream when mainstream CMSs default to anti-standards output? The time and expertise required to adjust them makes it uneconomic for all but the most committed of clients.
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My CV type thing and my Life of Ben (Blog). Nigel Peck's Accessify Forum Requirements.
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Not sure if this will be of help or not. I recently met with Hisoft and Microsoft to talk about the tool kit and share point.
It was all very interesting and at least its taking steps ( albeit small ones ) in the right direction. So no complaints there.
However the point of most interest was that MS have moved accessibility right into the same department as security and given it the same importance within Microsoft.
Now given Microsoft's track record with security that may not be good news ! 
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If it can go wrong it will. So don't worry about it.
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Accessibility is the exact opposite of security?
Then again, they seem to put a lot of resources into security. Lots of updates being downloaded by hundreds of millions of customers each month, for free. If they commit those kinds of resources to the accessibility of their web technologies, there might well be hope for them.
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My CV type thing and my Life of Ben (Blog). Nigel Peck's Accessify Forum Requirements.
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Hy everyone, my name is Ricardo Magalhães and I'm a Sharepoint Specialist Consultant from Portugal.
I have been in a session in TechDays 2008 Portugal on Acessibility and there were quite a few advices from Luis Calado (Microsoft Portugal) on this subject. I will try to summarize the main topics:
- Don't use the master pages out of the box from Sharepoint, use the AKS (acessibility Kit) or the Minimal Master Page instead.
- Avoid using Web Parts and use Web Controls or Publishing controls form Sharepoint instead, if you need to use Web Parts you need to change the render of the Web Part Zones.
- Use third party solutions for Content edition: Telerik RAD Editor – W3C WAG level A
- Validate acessibility = validate master page + validate page layouts + validate content
- Include alternative texts in all text elements.
- Use relative font size.
These were just a few advices for all to achive the Acessibility in Sharepoint.
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Wow, I have just setup Sharepoint, Sharepoint Designer and Services on a server at work so we can have a play with a new Intranet and collaboration stuff.
On usbability front, Sharepoint seems excellent.
But my word, the code behind the scenes is absolutely revolting. Tables all over the place, inline styles dotted around.
Now if it was just tables, I could deal with it in terms of making a nice new css file, but all this inline stuff. It's going to take me ages to get to grips with it all.
What is your advice in terms of master pages? I've just copied and renamed a theme so I can play with that. I obviously can't mess to much with the master page because of all the built-in webparts and content sections.
What an absolute mess.
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I've written an article for a legal magazine on Sharepoint and accessibility, using information from this thread and interviews with Adrian Higginbotham and a representative of HiSoftware, who work with MS to build the Accessibility Kit for Sharepoint:
http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/...
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www.brucelawson.co.uk
Web Evanglist, Opera, WaSP Accesibility Task Force
Study the Web Standards Curriculum
International Lothario (retired)
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I have tried to build a roadmap on Sharepoint 2007 accessible sites building in my blog, you can find these articles:
http://techtalkpt.wordpress.com/...
http://techtalkpt.wordpress.com/...
The objective is to provide the guidelines and some examples. It is based on my own experience building accessible sites in Sharepoint 2007 with level AA of accessibility.
Hope it helps because at the time it would have helped me.
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"The apparent inability for the ‘out of the box’ rich text editor to define headings (h1, h2, etc) "
I totally aggree with you on this. I met several frustrating issues when I using Rich Text aditor, like enlarging the size, especially up-loading pictures with full url. Since I am charging the forum, it is extremely difficulty.
With no option I downloaded an add-on called sharepoint rich text boost from www.sharepointboost.com. So far, this tool works well.
If anyone figured out new solution please let me know.
Thanks in advance.
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