sharepoint accessibility

Question

How compatible / compliant is sharepoint with current accessibility rules.

Also how compliant is it with the UK disability act?

Answer 1

Not sure about the compatibility with the UK act, but you could have a look at the following:

The Accessibility Kit for SharePoint (AKS) version 2.0

which can be found here

Answer 2

I don't believe there's been a court case yet to establish exactly what level of accessibility is required to comply with the Act. However I worked on a UK site requiring accessibility last year and found that MOSS 2007 is certainly lacking in this area out of the box.

We were aiming for AA compliance (WAI Priority 2). The main problem was that we had to remove any JavaScript that might be required for the site to operate correctly, in case screen readers could not handle it. This rules out a lot of the out-of-the-box controls and really restricts you to developing a purely public Internet facing site without any collaboration features.

We also used bits of the AKS that Colin mentions, as well as the CSS control adapters. These worked OK but were fiddly to configure and the control adapters liked to take over and affect the entire site. Since then AKS 2.0 and the ARF toolkit have been released which I'm sure are easier to use. I would definitely take a look at ARF as Vincent Rothwell is behind it who really knows his stuff.

Despite the difficulties I found the challenge and different way of looking at designing an accessible web site very interesting. As an aside I would say that accessibility is something that people only pay lip service to but don't actually bother to purchase a screen reader and test the site. Your site cannot be declared 'accessible' unless it has been tested with a couple of different screen readers.