Comments on: SharePoint 2010 Accessibility Event

By: AlastairC

AlastairC — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:24:48 +0000

Heh, I was hoping for something like “doing the site accessibly first time around was probably about 50% longer”, but I guess that’s hard to say.

I’m going to try and make that event, it would be good to learn more.

By: Martin Hatch

Martin Hatch — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:56:47 +0000

Hehe, a very open question, but that’s ok!

The main challenge in that implementation was developing the process and learning about the best way of developing the systems, and as you say designing and baking it into the design from the ground up, not adding it on as an after thought.

It’s no doubt that building from scratch with an inexperienced team is going to be very expensive.

re-doing it now would be vastly quicker, both because we now know a lot of the pit-falls and challenges but also because a lot of the hard work has already been done.

I think that using the re-usable framework (SAS) you would now be looking at a similar development effort to a normally produced website (taking the assumption of course that the developers know what they are doing and you don’t have to teach them how to build page layouts and controls again!)

I’m presenting at the SUGUK on the 25th about “Developing Accessible SharePoint Systems” so I’ll be covering a lot of the technical detail around the “how” then if you are interested?

By: AlastairC

AlastairC — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:34:50 +0000

Hi Martin,

Thanks for that, you could also be picking up on my frustration that it was oriented around fixing, rather than creating it ‘properly’ to start with.

In your experience then, how much extra time (proportionally) was it to implement the RNIB site compared to doing an inaccessible version of the same functionality?

And then, using that experience and re-usable framework, how much extra effort would it be now?

By: Martin Hatch

Martin Hatch — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:23:28 +0000

Alastair, really good article. Some nice pointers and plenty of food for thought. I find it a little frustrating that so much seems to have been focused on AKS (yes, I know, it WAS a HiSoftware event) but there doesn't seem to have been any mention of what other people have been doing in the SharePoint space regarding accessibility. I find the remark from Nikki "it isn't going to meet AA compliance .. even with the AKS(2)" quite infuriating, as though AKS is the be all and end all of SharePoint accessibility. We at Content and Code have developed both an intranet and website in AAA (yes, TRIPLE-A) for the RNIB, built exclusively on MOSS 2007, and have developed this on a re-usable framework! There are lots of partners doing great things in the Accessibility space... just annoying that HiSoftware steals all the headlines.