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Accessibility Kit for SharePoint 1.1 und Roadmap

Auf der SharePointConference in Redmond hat HiSoftware die Version 1.1 des Accessibility Kits für SharePoint veröffentlicht und auch einen Blick auf die nächste Version AKS 2.0 gegeben, die im 3.QU.2008 erscheinen soll. Außerdem wurde ein Accessible Rich Read More......( read more ) Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks

Which Doctype to use with SharePoint 2007?

Designing and developing accessible web sites on top of SharePoint 2007 gets more and more attention in the community. But the more developers try to reach the required accessibility or standards compliancy level, the more challenges they face and the more questions pop up. One of such questions is which doctype should be used for standards compliant and accessible web sites. As for SharePoint 2007 the answer is simple: XHTML - it is the only possibility. SharePoint 2007 is built upon ASP.NET 2.0: it makes use of the ASP.NET 2.0 runtime and enriches it with extra functionality. ASP.NET 2.0 has been designed to render XHTML output. Although the compliancy level can be set in web.config not all controls adjust their output to this configuration. Furthermore the runtime itself uses hidden fields for State Management: all these fields contains the ID attribute which begins with __ (double underscore). Unfortunately such names are allowed only in XHTML so there is no chance for fallback to HTML 4.01 unless you want to rewrite the ASP.NET 2.0 runtime. The choice for XHTML as the only possible doctype for ASP.NET 2.0 and SharePoint 2007 applications is quite odd knowing it's the only doctype so far officially not supported by Microsoft browsers. According to the specification all XHTML pages should be served with the application/xhtml+xml mime-type. This allows the parser (no matter whether it is a User Agent or another information system) to process the file as if it was an XML...

SharePoint 2007 redirect solved: using 301 instead of 302 redirects

Each time you request a Site Collection ( http://domain/ ) or a Site ( http://domain/foo/ ) of your Publishing Site you get redirected to the .aspx">.aspx">.aspx">.aspx">http://domain/Pages/<WelcomePage>.aspx . SharePoint 2007 uses the 302 header (location temporarily moved) for this purpose. Surprisingly even WSS uses the 302 header to redirect a root url to the default.aspx. In comparison ASP.NET uses an internal redirect to render the default page when the root url requested: there is no redirect in this situation. The whole issue about the 302 headers is that the redirected locations don't get crawled by search spiders which don't follow temporarily moved pages. While it's not really an issue for intranet environments it has major impact on indexing the content of Internet-facing web sites and making them searchable using a search engine. Looking for an answer I have researched the SharePoint runtime: SPHttpHandler, SPRequestModule and PublishingHttpModule classes. As none of these has given me a clear answer I have noticed that there are multiple references to the Redirect method present in the code which uses the 302 header as well. To solve the issue I have designed a custom redirect HttpModule which uses 301 headers instead. The requirements The module must rewrite all request for a Site Collection or Site. Url's of these request might but don't have to contain trailing slash (/). Furthermore the module must distinct...

The impact of developing an accessible web site in SharePoint 2007

The development process of a typical Web Content Management solution based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 consists of three main areas: User Experience, Functionality and Deployment. The development process begins mostly with designing the total User Experience. Based on the business requirements the designers determine the particular areas on the web site and the corresponding functionality. The typical products of this stage are the User Interface (UI) design and the Interaction design – the way the UI responds to the user input. The next stage is translating the User Interface into code: HTML, Cascade Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript (if any client-side interaction required). As the products of this cycle form the baseline for the solution to be delivered it is crucial to name all the requirements of the total product and in particular the accessibility aspects. During the last stage of the User Experience phase the translated User Interface is being incorporated into SharePoint 2007. At this moment the Master Pages and Page Layouts are being formed and the content areas and the Web Part Zones are being determined and placed within the Page Layouts. In many cases the User Interface incorporated in SharePoint 2007 is being hand over to the developers who are going to fill it with the dynamic controls they are going to build. Using the original User Experience translations the developers start their work. First of all basing on the original User Experience...

Automatically marking up abbreviations and acronyms in SharePoint 2007

Accessibility is a broad term and reaches way beyond the standards compliant code only. Accessibility is in my belief a set of features improving the understanding of information presented by an information system. I have to admit though compliant and semantic HTML is a very important factor of accessibility as it hosts the information. As I have recently solved the issue of standards compliant HTML in SharePoint 2007 I have started looking for new challenges and accessibility improving solutions. Almost immediately I have stumbled upon automatically marking up abbreviations in content. I have faced exactly the same challenge during the Rock My Website competition last year when John, Martijn and myself were building an accessible web site in ASP.NET. I wanted to implement a solution which would automatically markup all known abbreviations in de content using some kind of dictionary. As we weren't using any Content Management System we would need to think of another way to maintain the abbreviations dictionary. Eventually we have dropped the idea then, but now we have SharePoint 2007. Looking at standard SharePoint 2007 features I have almost immediately came up with a solution for this challenge. The requirements First of all to Provide a user friendly way to maintain the abbreviations dictionary. Storing it in a central location will decrease the amount of work required to maintain the dictionary and keep the definitions consistent. Then markup all the abbreviations found...

Automatically generating a hierarchical Title in <title> element

Recently while working on an Internet facing web site for one of our customers I thought of creating a control which would automatically create a hierarchical Title in the <title> element, like: Site Collection - Current Site - Current Page. Standard SharePoint 2007 allows you to define the title on the Master Page and within a Page Layout. Default SharePoint 2007 displays the Page Title in the <title> element. As I've been recently researching the accessibility issues I have noticed that such a behavior can cause loosing the context - especially if the visitor is vision impaired. Secondly it might cause search engines indexing a page and not linking it to the organization (Site Collection) or for example a division within it (Site). You could solve it using the standard features like displaying the Site's Title using <SharePoint:ProjectProperty> but still it wouldn't provide me the flexibility I wanted it to have. That's why I have decided to make a control which would automatically generate a title based on the existing hierarchy. The requirements The most important is generating a title consisting of information from the three levels: Site Collection, Site and Page the user is currently on. As you might want to hide the Site Collection title in some cases it should be also optional whether it should be displayed or not. In my example I have used a minus as a separator: however it should be possible to set the separator without rewriting the...

W3C Validator for SharePoint 2007

SharePoint 2007 is a very extensible development platform. Thanks to its flexibility the developers keep coming with new features which extend the user experience. One of the areas where the things are still missing is the Web Content Management: accessibility in particular leaves plenty of challenges to be tackled and features to be added by the accessibility enthusiasts and developers. One of these is the W3C Validator for SharePoint 2007. As I've mentioned some time ago we are busy here at Imtech ICT Business Solutions designing, developing and testing our own accessibility toolkit for SharePoint 2007. As the whole solution works perfectly I have started looking for some other ideas on how to extend it and enrich the editors' experience. One of the ideas I've got was incorporating the W3C Validator support into SharePoint 2007. First of all the requirements. As it's supposed to be editors' tool it needs to reside on the Publishing Console. It's supposed to validate the page: preferably before it's published so an editor can correct his mistakes if any found. Then the report: embedded into SharePoint 2007 or just a redirect? As embedding might enhance the total experience it would require you to provide new versions of the SOAP response parser (as the response you get from the W3C Validator is in the SOAP 1.2 format). Because most of the people dealing with accessibility and standards compliancy are familiar with the generated output that's the...

Webrichtlijnen (WCAG 1.0 Priority 2+) Accessibility in SharePoint 2007

Last Thursday I gave a presentation about accessibility in SharePoint 2007: the existing challenges and my approach to it. I have been invited by the Dutch Information Worker User Group to share my experience with other Dutch developers. Standing on the other side on such an event was my first time. I have to admit I did find it quite exciting and didn't really know what to expect of it - being a developer it's not really your daily job to speak for a group of over 40 people. For those of you who didn't have the chance to attend my presentation let me give you a brief overview of the contents. Developing SharePoint 2007 solutions is quite different as soon as you take accessibility into consideration - especially if it's as highly leveled as the guidelines in the Netherlands. It's very important that you understand the way the whole platform works before you begin designing and developing an accessible solution. SharePoint 2007 and ASP.NET 2.0 both don't support it out of the box. It is possible though but quite challenging. Understanding the plumbing of both platforms will make your life way easier. Choosing for an accessible Internet facing site built upon SharePoint 2007 has major impact on the design and development phases. You have to start with designing an accessible User Interface which will eventually make big part of the delivered User Experience. Then the difficult part comes: translating the drawings and sketches into HTML, CSS and JavaScript...

First 100% Webrichtlijnen (WCAG 1.0 Priority 2+) compliant SharePoint site - almost there

As I have recently mentioned, here at Imtech ICT Business Solutions we are busy with first 100% Webrichtlijnen compliant Internet facing web site based on SharePoint 2007. Earlier this week we have finished the development en begun testing the solution. Yes, we have discovered a few undocumented features which we have immediately resolved. Anyway testing for compliancy with the Dutch government's guidelines was a serious part of this project and it was my job to achieve this goal. As I have mentioned earlier I have developed a toolkit which helps gaining enough control over the generated page output just to make it compliant and yet still working. Furthermore I have taken a look at the response of each request and decided to clean this one as well. As a result I have taken the response size from 788kB down to 303kB! That's more than 50% per request on the home page only! During the development we did have to consider the compliancy. For a moment it looked like we would be getting problems with custom controls' events linked through in-line JavaScript. Using our client side script library we have succeeded to preserve the same link using unobtrusive JavaScript though. The last one were the Web Parts. I have to admit: I have hoped AKS would help me on this one. A bunch of good guys working on a serious compliancy solution for SharePoint and they have admitted there would come over 20 Control Adapters shipped with AKS. When I got the AKS release in my hands and installed...

Rock My Website: download winners' code

A while ago John, Martijn and myself have won the Rock My Website competition . John has mentioned this earlier in one of his posts . We have chosen to develop our project using ASP.NET 2.0. Quite challenging we thought - especially if you consider the automation level of ASP.NET and the amount of code generated by the framework. To reach the desired accessibility and compliancy level we have used various techniques like custom Page class, JavaScript classes and alternative style sheets. After the competition we have received quite a few questions regarding our approach and the techniques we have used. To make it more transparent for all of you interested in accessibility and compliance of ASP.NET 2.0 based websites we have decided to share the code of our project. As you the competition has been organized and hosted by Microsoft Netherlands. That is why we have chosen to make our code available as a Starter Kit. Unfortunately Microsoft didn't seem to be interested in our solution and didn't really see the added value of the whole idea. Quite a pity in my opinion considering Microsoft's web products are not really known as top-compliant. Anyway we didn't get discouraged. We have decided to put the project on our CodePlex Project site so you can download it and use our techniques in your projects. The site content and our accessibility statement are both in Dutch. Don't get discouraged by any of these though: feel free to comment our code and ask any questions...

ASP.NET events can cause troubles

...if you are developing a Webrichtlijnen compliant website in ASP.NET or let's say in... SharePoint 2007! Recently a new version of the Webrichtlijnen on-line quick scan tool has been released. Not that long ago I have reported that my concept on making SharePoint 2007 sites 100% Webrichtlijnen compliant did work . As soon as I have checked the same code using the newer version of the quick scan tool I have found there were still some errors present in the website. These errors are JavaScript events related and these are attached to the ASP.NET controls. Let me explain it to you by using an ASP.NET button as an example. So let's say you're making a custom search Web Part: a text field to enter the search query and a button to run the search. Using the ASP.NET events concept you create a new OnClick event for the button and you attach it to your button. What ASP.NET does is it creates a JavaScript onclick event and attaches it to the output. What you see in the source code of the rendered page is something like <input type="button" onclick=".... Why is this a problem? Conform the Webrichtlijnen you are supposed to be using non-obtrusive JavaScript. Any in-line events are therefore forbidden. An onclick attached to a button or any other control is a no-go. But does it mean you cannot use these events at all? Well, it depends. If you're building a quite simple Web Part like the one above you could use one of the Web Part's methods triggered...

Another Internet facing website based on SharePoint 2007

...Coming soon - really soon. Last week we have started realising a new project for one of our customers: an Internet facing website based on SharePoint's 2007 WCM. It would've been 'just another' plain SharePoint 2007 WCM solution, but since we love new challenges here at Imtech ICT Business Solutions we have decided to use our last concept : developing Webrichtlijnen compliant SharePoint 2007 sites. Since the project has just started we have the possibility to take this extra requirement in consideration in all the custom features we're going to deliver and just get sure it's all Webrichtlijnen compliant. As far as I know there are no Webrichtlijnen compliant SharePoint 2007 based websites out there. It's extra challenging then to be the first one to prove it is actually possible. As there are many people waiting on the official release of the AKS who do care about accessible and compliant websites, it seems to me a really nice show case for our lightweight compliancy kit. John (also member of the development team on this project) and I will post our experiences on regular basis so check out our blog once in a while if you are interested in accessibility in SharePoint and the things we have stumbled upon during the project. And if you're more interested in the toolkit itself: I've been recently invited to give a presentation about accessibility challenges in SharePoint 2007 at Dutch Information Worker User Group on November the 29th. It is...

AKS won't help you

At least if you are a Dutch SharePoint developer and you’re supposed to deliver a fully Webrichtlijnen compliant, SharePoint based Internet facing site solution. Earlier this week I’ve attended the presentation of HiSoftware AKS @ TechEd Developers Barcelona . As they are busy with it quite for some time now without sharing any useful information I’ve been very interested and expecting quite a lot from the session. Every SharePoint developer knows that SharePoint’s rendering engine is disastrous and it’s definitely challenging just getting it right. Anyway there was this session… 'Building Accessible Web Sites Using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and the Accessibility Kit for SharePoint' First of all the HiSoftware guy didn’t show up at all ­– kind of perfect presentation of your own product isn’t it? Then there was that introduction by Ben Robb. Quite comprehensive but out of scope though: the subject was actually focusing on SharePoint instead of introduction to web accessibility and compliancy. It’s definitely important to point out the most important reasons and business cases but that’s it. As I’ve already mentioned guys from HiSoftware have spent quite some time so far on developing the toolkit. And what we’ve seen on the demo? Rewritten SharePoint CSS and a few control adapters only! You have probably heard that they are first planning the release of the solution targeting Internet facing sites. Now how many of you actually use the beautiful BlueBand...

Accessible SharePoint 2007: It's now officially a 100% Webrichtlijnen(NL)/WCAG compliant

Yesterday I have found out that the bug we have found while testing our compliancy toolkit, is fixed. What you see now is the nice green 100%. After I have published the first post about our SharePoint Compliancy toolkit I have realised that I haven't mentioned what the Webrichtlijnen actually is. As it's a Dutch product it doesn't have to be necessarily obvious to everybody what it contains. Webrichtlijnen is a set of accessibility guidelines created on behalf of the Dutch government. In 2006 the Dutch government has noticed the increase of digital information systems hosted by Dutch government organisations. What's more they have notice the lack of accessibility implemented in these applications and websites. As they are supposed to improve the access to information and the involved business processes accessibility has become all of a sudden a must-have. After a research the Dutch government has found out that there only a few companies capable of designing and developing accessible websites and that implementing it isn't that obvious, they have decided to define the guidelines for accessible websites. In their work they have used the WCAG 1.0 guidelines as a primary input. Unfortunately they have chosen for their own set of guidelines which is WCAG 1.0 Priority 2+ (1, 2 plus some guidelines from 3). And I mean unfortunately because there is no way at this moment to check whether your site is Webrichtlijnen compliant other than using the on-line scan tool...

Accessible SharePoint 2007: It's now officially 100% Webrichtlijnen(NL)/WCAG compliant

Yesterday I have found out that the bug we have found while testing our compliancy toolkit, is fixed. What you see now is the nice green 100%. After I have published the first post about our SharePoint Compliancy toolkit I have realised that I haven't mentioned what the Webrichtlijnen actually is. As it's a Dutch product it doesn't have to be necessarily obvious to everybody what it contains. Webrichtlijnen is a set of accessibility guidelines created on behalf of the Dutch government. In 2006 the Dutch government has noticed the increase of digital information systems hosted by Dutch government organisations. What's more they have notice the lack of accessibility implemented in these applications and websites. As they are supposed to improve the access to information and the involved business processes accessibility has become all of a sudden a must-have. After a research the Dutch government has found out that there only a few companies capable of designing and developing accessible websites and that implementing it isn't that obvious, they have decided to define the guidelines for accessible websites. In their work they have used the WCAG 1.0 guidelines as a primary input. Unfortunately they have chosen for their own set of guidelines which is WCAG 1.0 Priority 2+ (1, 2 plus some guidelines from 3). And I mean unfortunately because there is no way at this moment to check whether your site is Webrichtlijnen compliant other than using the on-line scan tool...