HiSoftware AccRepair for SharePoint Designer and AccMonitor bring accessibility compliance to SharePoint based websites
Since the widely referenced Improvements in Accessibility blog entry was posted here over a year, we have received numerous inquiries about how to further improve accessibility of SharePoint based websites up to the point of being fully compliant with standards such as the U.S. government’s Section 508 and the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0. Although we don’t have any updates beyond the aforementioned blog entry to announce right now, a few of our partners have been successful in helping customers implement accessibility compliant websites such as Wise Woman, and Plymouth Hospitals.
The SharePoint product group recognizes the importance of accessibility, especially for Internet facing public websites that have been built with SharePoint technology. To provide a channel for dialogue between our customers and partners with us as well as amongst themselves, I’m pleased to announce the creation of the Microsoft hosted SharePoint – Accessibility online forum.
With HiSoftware’s announcement last week of AccRepair for SharePoint Designer and in conjunction with AccMonitor, many customers will be able to design and implement accessibility compliant SharePoint based websites without costly consulting services or development resources. The following guest blog entry is written by Robert B. Yonaitis, Chief Technology Officer at HiSoftware.
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Approximately one-fifth of the people in the United States have one or more forms of legal disability, and that ratio is fairly consistent for the developed nations throughout the world. The Web can be a great enabler for people with disabilities, who use assistive technologies such as screen readers along with their computers to find and access information and applications on a website, but only if the website had been designed with accessibility in mind. This has become such an important issue that many countries, such as the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Australia in addition to the U.S., have legislated requirements for accessible website design.
Now with HiSoftware’s AccRepair software fully integrated into SharePoint Designer, designers and developers can build accessible content and entire websites whether or not they are experienced in the accessibility guidelines or have a technical background in this area.
HiSoftware also provides an accessibility testing portal at http://www.cynthiasays.com. The engine behind CynthiaSays drives all of HiSoftware’s commercial products. The CynthiaSays testing portal has been widely used and trusted by the website developer community with over 15 million tests completed. AccRepair for SharePoint Designer brings this functionality to SharePoint-based website designers and developers.
So, how does AccRepair for SharePoint Designer work?
AccRepair for SharePoint Designer is a user driven interactive desktop tool-that allows SharePoint Designer users to test and remediate content for accessibility compliance as part of their website design and build process. This means you design, test, and fix in a single simple process, minimizing work and effort and most importantly, “doing it right the first time”, which is much easier than fixing something after it has already been built and deployed. AccRepair provides built-in tests for statutory rules and regulations according to worldwide accessibility guidelines (e.g. W3C WCAG 1.0, Section 508, CLF, etc.), but it also allows users to configure the tests to match and meet their development practices and accessibility goals.
Many of the rules provide guidance along the line of “you must have this…” or “if you have this, then you must do that…” AccRepair allows you to tweak its XML based rules engine so that you can be sure you are integrating these rules into what you actually do. That way, you can validate your appropriate use of skip navigation, metadata, data tables, and define form handling and for requirements amongst other things. If you are not an accessibility guru, the software provides simple and easy to follow instructions, guideline and tutorials to bring accessibility into the grasp of any website designer/developer or content creator.
Once you have fully configured AccRepair with all of the necessary rules, it is important to recognize that accessibility testing and remediation cannot be totally automated even by the best of software products. This is because many of the rules will trigger questions that can only be answered by a human tester. AccRepair addresses this with a unique Accessibility Interview Wizard (pictured below), which steps the user through a small set of validation issues, allowing questions to be answered in an interactive fashion. The manual test results are incorporated into the automated results-giving the SharePoint Designer user a comprehensive analysis, record, and audit trail of the accessibility testing results.
Repairing forms and tables
When working in the SharePoint Designer environment, you can use the AccRepair form repair utility to quickly and easily mark up your forms – from simple or complex – to make them accessible and to do so without any knowledge of accessibility or of HTML or XHTML coding. The integrated AccRepair table repair utility (pictured below) provides automated markup for simple data tables based on accessibility guidelines and best practices, and it simplifies the repair of complex and sophisticated data tables through a wizard guided process. What could take hours to accomplish manually can instead be done in minutes through the wizard driven repair utilities.
Repairing images
One of the biggest challenges with accessibility is alternative text for images and all other non-text based content elements. AccRepair for SharePoint Designer integrates an image repair utility (pictured below), which allows users to define alternative text for images, replicate the fixes across shared images or shared libraries, and even optionally collaborate with other team members and other users for consistence and “common look and feel” across a multi-tiered development environment. AccRepair can take a fix and replicate it across an entire website in a matter of seconds.
The complete solution
AccRepair for SharePoint Designer provides the ability to handle many more remediation issues such as image maps, but the key to accessibility is to understand what you need to do because you can’t fix something if you don’t know it’s broken. While AccRepair is a client-side application that helps individual website designers/developers, AccMonitor is a server-side application that provides over 170 accessibility checks based on Section 508 and WCAG 1.0 guidelines and can be integrated with SharePoint Server’s content authoring workflow. For more information about how HiSoftware’s products and services can help you achieve accessibility compliance for your SharePoint based website, please contact us by clicking here.
Robert B. Yonaitis
Chief Technology Officer, HiSoftware
ryonaitis@hisoftware.com
