Accessibility and SharePoint 2010
Standards
As a starting point, SharePoint adopted the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, WCAG 2.0, and set a goal for Level AA. Becoming a W3C recommendation on December 11th,
2008, WCAG 2.0 defines the expectations of and the techniques deployed
in well-built, accessible Web sites. The SharePoint teams followed the
spec’s developments, and we designed and tested SharePoint 2010 against
the guidelines. WCAG 2.0 represents a modern, international standard
that’s as valuable to developers as it is to Web users.
Core Investments
The four principles of WCAG 2.0 are Perceivable, Operable,
Understandable, and Robust. For each area, SharePoint has made key
investments, and here I’ll scratch the surface to describe a few:
Percievable
- SharePoint 2010 delivers broad changes to describe content and media and to explain controls.
- The redesigned masterpage leverages CSS and presents content in the appropriate sequence.
Operable
- Keyboard interaction has been a cornerstone in our feature evaluations to maximize device compatibility and usability.
- Proper heading structures have been added to pages for informational, organizational, and navigational benefits.
- Core to a trustworthy interface is a dependable focus, and we’ve
invested heavily in protecting the users focus and in deferring control
to the user agent wherever possible.
Understandable
- Across SharePoint, we’ve improved language support, and we’ve
integrated this information into our pages and into our advanced
editors.
- SharePoint supports browser settings to zoom content and operating system features to increase font sizes.
Robust
- Our new design efforts let us declare DocTypes and specify
CSS-standards rendering for our masterpages. This has dramatically
improved our cross-browser support.
- Broad investments were made to update our markup to be like
well-formed XML, and the new rich text editor has clean markup and a
function to convert its content into XHTML.
We’ve tested these principles with and without Assistive Technologies to verify their value for all users.
ARIA Integration
ARIA stands for Accessible
Rich Internet Applications, and it specifies descriptive extensions for
Web applications. Like WCAG, WAI-ARIA is from the W3C’s Web
Accessibility Initiative. In a nutshell, ARIA allows an inaccessible
element, such as a div with an onclick attribute, to surface itself as a button control. This can be done with a new role
attribute set to “button”—it’s that simple. SharePoint leverages ARIA
in the Ribbon, in dialogs, in our new rich text editor, and elsewhere in
the platform and in partner applications.
Examples of other Accessibility Investments:
Dialogs, the ribbon, keyboard support, tab access, command access, enhanced tooltips, ARIA Integration, InfoPath Forms, assistive technology friendly, project grid editing, and keyboard navigation.
To learn more please view our
source.