SharePoint 2007 WCM Solutions can be accessible

Question

Recently I've been busy with a research on accessibility of Web Content Management solutions based on SharePoint 2007. My outcome is: SharePoint 2007 WCM solutions can be accessible and depending on the approach you can score up to 95% WCAG 1.0 Priority 2.0 compliancy without any toolkit.

I've been wondering whether anybody else shares my opinion or has his/her own...

Answer 1

I'd love to see some of your findings.. this sounds like a fantastic subject for a blog post! Been reading your work in this area on your blog... you definately know what's going on here. I'm particuarly curious how much effort you think is required to make a MOSS WCM Publishing site WCAG 1.0 P2 compliant, both without toolkits and with them (ala AKS).

Answer 2

I'm definitely going to pick it up Andrew. I've been planning to blog about my experience on accessibility in SharePoint 2007 for a while now. Any challenges or issues are really welcome. In the meanwhile I'm going to continue my work on the compliancy toolkit and best practices for developing accessible web sites in SharePoint 2007.

Answer 3

It is definately possible ... as we have just achieved it ourselves on the RNIB Website (http://www.rnib.org.uk) which launched yesterday (including back-end administration / editing / publishing) .. but the downside is it involves a LOT of work (we had already delivered an Intranet for them).

To try and make this as re-usable as possible we basically ended up building an entire re-usable framework .. but we didn't really use a "toolkit", we just worked on using Rendering Templates, Control Adapters, Delegate Controls and custom Master Page / CSS (lots of!) and ASPX / ASCX markup to make the output render how we wanted.

The resulting output is fully WCAG 2.0 AAA and XHTML 1.1 Transitional.

I'm also hoping to blog about this, and I'm hoping to be able to hold some "Deep Dive" sessions on how we achieved all of this at events in the UK, but none of the details are firmed up yet, but with the launch being 48 hours fresh I'm still reeling a bit from late nights and strong coffee :)

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regards
Martin Hatch
MCPD .Net Web Development
MCTS WSS 3.0 | MOSS 2007
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