What are the best methods to ensure our SharePoint implementation is accessible?

Question

Are there any blogs, guides, checklists, or controls we should be using to ensure our SharePoint implementation is accessible? Preferrably to the W3C double A standard, or as close to that as we can get.

We're implementing an extranet solution.

Answer 1

The best place to start is the Accessibility Kit for Sharepoint. With this, you may reach single A standard, but in my experience, you will find it very tough to reach AA.

Microsoft didn't factor in accessibility in Sharepoint, and even 2007 suffers from a huge overdependence on table layout.

Good luck!

Answer 2

How are you deploying the implementation? Is it as an Intranet, or, is it as a public facing website.

I think one of the first rules is to be extremely selective with the use of out of the box web parts. Many of the web-parts I looked at weren't compliant even on a basic level.

Andrew

Answer 3

This study has already been funded by Microsoft, and unfortunately the results only seem to be online in a Word Document.

The document is hosted on this blog: http://blog.mastykarz.nl/best-practices-for-developing-accessible-web-sites-in-microsoft-office-sharepoint-server-2007/

And the path to the document is here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=121877

I'm unsure on whether it would be a good thing to copy the contents of that into here to fully answer the question in a way that will be indexed by search engines, but I'll play safe as it's not my content.

Answer 4

The best way is to run checks as you develop so you know where your pain points are. The next step maybe to start with a minimal masterpage so you can choose what elements are presented to the user.

More advanced you can override the render methods to remove or change bits of the page that are not compliant with your checks. EG changing the case of tags (XHTML does not like all caps) A bit more in this guide.

http://techtalkpt.wordpress.com/2008/06/18/building-accessible-sharepoint-sites-part-1/ http://techtalkpt.wordpress.com/2008/08/07/building-accessible-sharepoint-sites-part-2/

Answer 5

I recently read the MOSS book by Andrew Connell (www.andrewconnell.com) and it has a chapter dedicated to accessibility and SharePoint sites.

Simply put SharePoint sites are very difficult to generate W3C AAA standards, but the Accessibility Kit is one of the best starting points.

Stronly recommend his book for this chapter (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0470224754?tag=andrewconnell-20&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0470224754&adid=18S6FKQJR5FZK56WHH6A&)

Answer 6

It depends how much of Sharepoint out of the box you are intending to use. In implementing our public facing site we managed to achieve AA compliance, although the amount of custom development required has raised questions over the benefits we are actually gaining from using Sharepoint in the first place.

A few pointers:

We made heavy use of SPQuery/SPSiteDataQuery to render site data to screen using xslt which gave us full control over the output. I found this link helpful:

http://blog.thekid.me.uk/archive/2007/02/25/xml-results-using-spsitedataquery-in-sharepoint.aspx

Check out RadEditor for Sharepoint for a nice accessible rich text editor for publishing.

For xhtml compliance, things were a little more tricky, we had to override most of the Sharepoint publishing controls' render methods to correct dodgy output.

If you are wanting to leverage the portal like capabilites of Sharepoint in your extranet it is more problematic. The web part framework is not accessible and I have not yet found a way to make it so. Any suggestions welcome!