Announcing Accessibility Kit for SharePoint 1.1 and Future Roadmap
During the SharePoint Conference last week, HiSoftware announced the general availability of AKS 1.1 (free and open source) and Compliance Sheriff for SharePoint (commercial product that rounds out HiSoftware's end-to-end solution for accessibility and other forms of content policy compliance).
AKS 1.1
AKS 1.1 provides 21 new control adapters that improve the accessibility of SharePoint 2007's blog and wiki features, and it's downloadable from http://aks.hisoftware.com. AKS 1.1 adds to the 24 control adapters, master pages, CSS files, and documentation that were released as part of AKS 1.0 a few months ago.
AKS 2.0
While AKS 1.0 and 1.1 should reduce the level of effort and knowledge needed by customers and partners to improve the accessibility of SharePoint-based sites/applications, we have received plenty of feedback that there's a need for more. Although taking open source contributions from the community remains a core part of our strategy for AKS, we realize that a growing number of customers simply cannot wait for that to happen. Hence, we've "double-downed" on our commitment to subsidize HiSoftware's continued development of the AKS.
AKS 2.0, to be released in Q3CY2008 will consist of the following:
- Smart Adapters – automation of control adapters through install settings
- Additional control adapters and remediation examples
- Web part zone control
- XHTML 1.0 Strict page level validation example – brute force approach
- Another page level validation example against a standard DOCTYPE Declaration (DTD)
- Additional requirements under Canadian Common Look and Feel 2.0 (CLF 2.0) guidelines
- Improvements to accessibility and usability of SharePoint's Document Library functionality
- Examples of remediation to comply with WCAG 2.0 Level AA
- French language version of AKS 1.0 components
Accessible Rich Text Editor (aRTE)
Separately, we've reached an agreement to license a fully accessible rich text editor that HiSoftware has been developing for the past several months so that it can be used for free by SharePoint customers similar to the way that Telerik's cross-browser compatible "MOSS Lite" RTE is free. The aRTE will have all of the basic content editing and formatting functionality and will be accessible for both the content author as well as the content viewer. The aRTE will be available in Q3CY2008 and sooner for select beta testers. Members of HiSoftware’s Technology Partner Program will have the ability to modify and extend the aRTE's source code as part of their custom SharePoint implementations.
The aRTE will have the following features:
- Accessible Output – XHTML 1.0 compliant
- Accessible Input – validates accessibility of content entered into the RTE
- Character formatting
- Paragraph formatting
- List bullet
- List number
- Quote/Indent
- Table of figures inc row and/or column headings
- Hyperlink
- Headings – levels 1-4
- ALT text for pictures
- Caption for pictures
- HTML source editing
- Table repair utility – assists in the creation of accessible data tables within the RTE
- Form creation and remediation
SharePoint vNext
It's still too early for me to disclose any details about our accessibility plans for the next version of SharePoint, but I can tell you that we've listened and learned a lot from all of the feedback that we've received from around the world regarding the need for accessibility both in terms of cross-browser compatibility and in the form of improved usability for vision impaired and physically challenged users. Overall, we are deeply committed to the Interoperability Principles recently announced by Steve Ballmer and Ray Ozzie, and in particular, Principle II: Support for Standards. Hence, from SharePoint's point of view, we are monitoring the ongoing standards work of the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative very closely. I look forward to providing more details about our accessibility plans for SharePoint vNext (and getting your feedback) on this blog later this year.
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