asp.net 508/WAI CMS

Question

2 questions:

1. Does using MVC make it any easier to build 508/WAI compliant sites?
2. Anyone know of a good asp.net based CMS platform that is 508/WAI compliant or at least, tries to make it easier to build sites that are?

Answer 1

1.) I think it does. MVC gives you full control over the HTML that is being rendered, which makes it easier to be fully 508 compliant.

2.) I'm working on a 508 compliant solution for the government that uses Sitecore as the CMS. It's a fantastic product all around and great in terms of 508 compliance. In addition to giving you full control over the HTML that is being rendered, it also has some neat built-in 508 features. For example, if people add an image to an item, the system will warn them if they forget to add alt-text. You can also add your own validation rules to the system.

Highly recommended, but not excactly cheap.

Answer 2

1. As Stefan said, yes, because of the control over mark-up - for example: you will be able to create a page that passes (X)HTML validation much more simply just because you're not having to fight the viewstate control being rendered to the page with an "_" in the id.

2. At the other end of the price scale (open source), I've recently started playing around with the MVC example for N2 CMS, which is working really nicely (waiting for the client to see it, so can't really post links at the moment). But that passes W3C, and Hi Software's Cynthia 508 and WAI compilancy checks.

The real issue we've found with a lot of CMS products is not that the website is compliant but that the editing interface is not compliant/accessible, or it's all to easy for a content editor to break the validation with some silly markup somewhere.