Making Sharepoint Portal DDA compliant

Question

My Requirement is ,

I need to have my sharepoint portal DDA compliant .. any thoughts ?? any reference i can take up ???


any assistance would be appreciated !!!

Regards

Answer 1

Hi,
 

Please be more specific about your requirement and your environment:

1.    What is your SharePoint product edition? SharePoint Portal Server 2003, SharePoint Server 2007 or other?

2.    What is “DDA compliant” used for?

 

The more information you provide, the quicker and better answer you will get.

-lambert

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Posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Answer 2

Sorry about that ..

1.  Its  MOSS 2007 .
2. I would say  WCAG 1.0 or  WCAG 2.0  compliant (which would include  DDA compliance for disabled people to use the portal).


Thanks !

Answer 3

WCAG questions go to SharePoint - Accessibility.

-lambert

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Posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Answer 4

Sorry Lambert.

I would have moved it to the Accessibility forum when I saw this post if I had known that the "DDA" compliancy meant for the disabled.

Sometimes it's difficult for people outside the US to keep up with all the US regulations :)

Just as you did, I should have asked what DDA compliancy meant but I presumed everyone else but me knew what it meant - certainly the original poster seemed to thing it was obvious to his readers :)

Answer 5

I apologize for not being elaborative to start with   !

But coming up to the point any idea any one???   

Answer 6

Hi,

A lot of your compliance for DDA will come through the way that the master page is designed and the way that the content is added.

The majority of the WCAG 2.0 A and AA guidelines can be attained with a good master page design (making sure logos have alt text, making sure that you can bypass the navigation, not having hover over menus etc) and also by educating the people who are adding the content to structure their content in an accessible way (such as not using click here for a link and writing in good quality, understandable "english" or whatever the identified language is of the website).

If you're just providing a front end content based website where the user is unlikely to use the back end of sharepoint then its not too difficult to reach A or even AA.

I'd recommend looking at the Sharepoint Accessibility Kit, the CSS Menu Controls and finally Plymouth NHS Trust - which is pretty accessible and I'm 95% sure that's MOSS behind it.

Mike

(PS. @ Mike Walsh, DDA is British - disabilities discrimination act)

Answer 7

Thanks Mike.

I (a British passport holder but 39 years (that long?) outside the UK) can only say it wasn't around in my time (to my knowledge).

You seem to know what you are talking about <grin> so I'll mark your post as an Answer. (If Mr Gupta objects, I'll remove it again....)

 

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WSS FAQ sites: WSS 2.0: http://wssv2faq.mindsharp.com WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007: http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com
Total list of WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 Books (including foreign language titles) http://wss.asaris.de/sites/walsh/Lists/WSSv3%20FAQ/V%20Books.aspx

Answer 8

Thanks Mike for your inputs.

Now about the accessibility Kit , i have already tried that ... not sure if we can present that as generic product for all users (users other than User Accessibility Group)

Though i did like the idea that plymouthhospitals  website has implemented with allowing users to increase font and contrast . I was wondering if its possible that we can let users select the theme and persist it everytime user logs in .   plymouthhospitals  website is giving option for users to increase font but is not persisting for the user..

Any thoughts on that  , i wont say thats the answer i was looking out for ..but yes was really helpful. i would want to wait for further opinions on this before i could call this as user.

Regards

Answer 9

Hi,

I believe the way that Plymouth does the change of font-size and background color is to use the querystring in the URL and take that into some custom code on the masterpage and then uses that to set a cookie (or a session variable) with that value stored in it.  Then whenever the cookie / session expires the page reverts to normal.  There's no reason why you can't set that cookie to expire next year so it stays the same on that machine.

Personally, I like the way Plymouth does it with CSS but I'm sure you can do it with Themes too.  Its the same process, just a different code.  Although personally I don't use themses and don't know if you can set it user by user.  You'll have to look elsewhere for that.

Mike

Answer 10

How Plymouth handles cookies aside, you cannot make MOSS 2007 WCAG 2.0 compliant across the whole product.

You may be able to make a publsihing site 90% + compliant, as soon as you start using a team site or collaborative elements, or a forms library for example, or in fact an administration area you'll find your hitting issues with WCAG mandatory levels 1 and some 2 elemetns of compliance.

Regards

John |Timney (MVP)

Answer 11

right now the only way i could think of going with this is ... httpmodule to handle the request  as the client i need to have this solution have UAGroup defined in AD so what i did is httpmodule   at prerequest  stage i checked for user's group in AD and changed the mastepage accordingly ...

cookie expiring next year ...??? not sure if that would be right way to do it :)

Answer 12

Hi,

I've used AKS and i don't like the way it works since it makes changes to the html in the end of the pipeline.

I prefer to user ARF that is another implementation that tries to solve accessibility problems. 

ARF is a framework of controls that replace the ones that comes with SharePoint (no all controls) and you can create new controls using the same idea.

The only requirements is that you need to know XSLT.