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SharePoint Server 2007

A frightening statistic

SharePoint Server 2007 out of the box has 154 HTML validation errors on its home page.

When I typed that line I started thinking, yes I know that’s a dangerous thing to do!, So what does Microsoft have to say on the subject of accessibility and SharePoint?

Some Googling later and, well they have a complete web site dedicated to the topic of accessibility. http://www.microsoft.com/enable/default.aspx

Grins mischievously to myself, oh go on then! so I did, I ran some automated tests against their accessibility site.
  • 23 Validation HTML errors on the home page. ( W3C validator )
  • CSS failed ! ( W3C validator )
  • Accessibility Automated testing – Failed ( Cynthia Portal )

    • On the “Microsoft's Commitment to Accessibility page” they state

    “Delivering on our corporate mission—To enable people and businesses throughout the world to realize their full potential—means we strive to build technology for everyone, including those who experience physical difficulties or disabilities”.

    By the way the page containing the above quote in text mode had 56 validation errors! With only 26 errors in the full image rich page – oh I give up!.

    If that’s their accessibility site what chances do we have with SharePoint?

    Well it’s like this, We buy SharePoint because it’s incredibly functionally rich out of the box, because its integration, not surprisingly, with Office is seamless. In my opinion it’s a killer app. I’ve been in love with it since release one when I did one of the largest implementations in the world.

    Here are quotes from a company, LBi,

    which at the SharePoint User group meeting on the 22 March showed that have taken on the accessibility challenge head first with SharePoint for one of their projects. Their lead developer had the following to say;

    A requirement from the start of the project was site accessibility to be at least double A standards. Therefore no table layouts and valid XHTML Strict. From very early on it was apparent that SharePoint needed a large amount of customisation to achieve this.

    "We quickly found the following
  • Malformed HTML tags (<img src=“pic.gif”>)
  • Inline style attributes (<div style=“font-size:3em”>)
  • Spurious wrapper elements (<div dir=“”><span>lorem)
  • Semantically incorrect
    • "

    He then went onto say;

    "Our initial investigations into whether web parts would serve our requirements were negative.

  • Web parts overridable to a point, inevitably core functionality was lost.
  • A number of web part classes remained sealed in the Beta 2 and Beta 2 TR versions that we were working with at that stage of the project."

    • And

    "The solution implemented tightly integrates with SharePoint but provides a similar level of functionality as the out of the box web part framework.

  • Each module is optional (with the exception of the membership module)
  • Each module can be trimmed by user type for example if the user logged in is a consultant."

    • Basically his message was if you want to keep the reason why we like SharePoint i.e. its functionality, firstly you have to effectively rewrite its GUI.

    There are several companies touting their “accessible SharePoint sites” but in virtually every case, if they are accessible, they are web sites powered by SharePoint and all the rich functionality has been stripped out. Such as www.fifteen.org.

    I freely admit that this was the approach I took with version 1 of SharePoint. I simply used SharePoint to deliver up the content, using its great work flow and document management functionality, and used Webdav queries and XML streams to display that content into Dreamweaver created pages.

    There are very few truly courageous companies that have taken on the task of producing accessible functionally rich SharePoint sites. Recently LBi showed us how they had done it. It was very impressive but they had rewritten the GUI of SharePoint totally, and I do mean totally, which is not a task for the faint hearted amongst us.

    They freely admitted also that they hadn’t touched the back end so that was still really bad in terms of accessibility. I’m hoping that one of the other companies at that event that stated they had done both the front and back ends of SharePoint in an accessible way does contact me as I requested. I’d really like to see what and how they have achieved this and also to try and buy some shares in that company.

    The Development manager for SharePoint at Microsoft, when they were starting to look at version 2 promised me it would be accessible. Foolishly I assumed he meant version 2. Well I’m still waiting.

    I really truly hope Microsoft get their act together and take a lead with this as it’s a fantastic product sadly let down by precluding an awful lot of users. Come on M$ you’ve got the muscle, the money and the capability get it right. PLEASE!