I have to say that MS, at least their developers, have made some significant strides with the 2.0 release of ASP.net. They seem more aware of the fact that there are more browsers than IE, and that developers actually like to have SOME control over the HTML that is spit out.

Alas, I have to agree, MS is just way behind the curve in terms of standards compliant, semantic and accessible output.

Granted, that’s true of most CMSes. *sigh*

As Riaz said thanks for the write up and thanks for attending!

In terms of accessibilty and validity I hear ya. The site we demoed is both valid XHTML Strict and also accessibilty tested (manually and automatically via online tools) to double A compliance.

We’ll give you all a shout when it goes live.

Ta

Andrew

Also I cannot see how you claim that either of those sites is functionally rich in the same way that sharepoint is. These are both skinned sites and nothing more IMHO. I’ve been doing that sinse sharepoint v1.0.

Lets see an accessible sharepoint site with rich functionality then I will be impressed. ( user customisation of page, discussion forums etc etc etc )

That’s a brilliant write-up, well done

I hope you enjoyed the meeting at LBi last week, we hope to do another session soon, so keep an eye out for that.

I’ll let you know when that accessible site goes live.

Thanks,
Riaz

p.s. just sent over the presentation from last week, so it should be on the SUGUK site very soon!

It looks like good progress, but I wouldn’t say they are quite there yet. Btw, what’s a “W1″ site?

Both wrap the whole page in a form (potentially very confusing for screen readers which employ a ‘forms mode’), and both use fixed-width content.

Fifteen seems to use quite a bit of inline styling (e.g. font face="Verdana" color="#E0078C"), and seems stuck with using only h3s within the content area. I guess this is due to limitations of the content editor? Neither site seems to use h1s.

Wise Woman uses XHTML 1.1, which (in spec terms) ‘must’ be sent as XML. (So you really want to use XHTML 1.0 at most, unless you don’t care about Internet Explorer.) The country drop-down fire’s onchange, which makes it fairly difficult for keyboard users.

Also, Fifteen’s top nav doesn’t seem to appear in Firefox? That’s not an accessibility thing as such, although it seems tied to font-sizing from a glance.

In terms of functionality, the presentation suggested that you basically have to re-write any controls that you use. Was this the same experience for you? There don’t seem to be many of the other functions from SharePoint.

Yes I did see that. It’s a good article, but from my point of view would be a little frustrating to use helping me pick a CMS (plus they didn’t try ours!). I suspect that you might get quite different results with some configuration of the interface.

Having said that, I know how much work it is to test these things, especially for the multi-layer aspects of accessibility (of the CMS, of it’s output, of the usability of the interface that affects the output…)

It took me 6 months just to draft what I wanted to check on just the editor part!

In the “usability for people with disabilities” sense then yes, structural markup, text alternatives and keyboard access are more priorities over strict conformance. But it’s best to have both if you can.

Alastair, have you seen Juicy Studio’s Choosing an Accessible CMS article from a couple of days ago? Seems you’re not the only one giving the CMS market a prod.