Company Net – Experts in Microsoft

Here are a few insights from Steven Gardner our Senior Technical Architect on the solution for achieving AA Compliance when using SharePoint for your website.

To start with a little bit about compliance:

Standards compliance is the adherence of a websites HTML and CSS markup to W3C standards.  Over the past couple of years making websites standards compliant has become a major driver in the development of public facing websites, why? In the not too distant past, few websites were developed to any form of standard but instead targeted a particular browser as their preferred display medium.  Targeting a particular browser had the effect that when a user viewed a website with a different browser, then at best the user suffered a less than optimal browsing experience but in the worst cases were completely unable to view the website.  As browser market share has become more distributed, from a business perspective, denying potential customer’s access to your website just because of the browser they use is simply throwing sales away!

The Problem

For web standards compliance, there are a number of fundamental issues which have to be addressed:

•  Lack of DOCTYPE
• Invalid HTML markup
• Table based layouts
• HTML containing custom attributes
• Over reliance on JavaScript for basic functions
• Use of inline CSS styles

The Solution

In partnership with Microsoft, HiSoftware developed the Accessibility Toolkit for SharePoint 2.0 (AKS).  The toolkit offers a number of new features to help meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 Priority 1 and 2 checkpoints (WCAG 1.0 AA) and the newest WCAG 2.0 AA Candidate Recommendation while significantly reducing the time, knowledge and effort required to implement such a website.

Along with developing the AKS, HiSoftware have also developed a direct replacement for the default text editor within SharePoint called Accessible Rich Text Editor(aRTE).  aRTE allows a user to edit content in a Word like editor but crucially ensuring that the output is XHTML compliant and accessible.

Steven’s White Paper on the full topic is available for download below:

Compliance White Paper