A short video has been released showcasing the RNIB website project, and how we (Content and Code) worked together with RNIB and Telerik to deliver a truly accessible web system in SharePoint.
Well worth a watch!
The best thing, I’m in it! 🙂 (yay, I’m famous!)
Following on from my presentation this week on Building an Accessible SharePoint System I had an interesting query from one of the attendees regarding accessible CAPTCHA methods.
For those who haven’t come across the term, CAPTCHA refers to the method of challenging users with a query that a human could pass but computers cannot (typically represented by images that display distorted text).
The query related directly to accessibility, and specifically how would you achieve CAPTCHA methods in an accessible way?
CAPTCHA themselves have the following statement on their website:
“CAPTCHAs must be accessible. CAPTCHAs based solely on reading text — or other visual-perception tasks — prevent visually impaired users from accessing the protected resource. Such CAPTCHAs may make a site incompatible with Section 508 in the United States. Any implementation of a CAPTCHA should allow blind users to get around the barrier, for example, by permitting users to opt for an audio or sound CAPTCHA”
This of course does not account for users who are both visually impaired and audible impaired (for example, a user who was both blind and deaf).
The solution to this could include a number of workarounds, including mathematical questions (“what is one plus two?”) or more “natural language” queries (“What is the colour of the sky on a clear day?”) but these could also present other problems.
Firstly generating enough of these prompts to disrupt predicting the responses to them would be problematic. You then have to consider cultural and language barriers, as well as other impairments such as textual or numerical dyslexia.
It’s certainly a difficult topic and one that is a challenge to get right without either leaving your site in an inaccessible state or leaving it open to programmatic mis-use.
To find out more about CAPTCHA you can visit the CAPTCHA Website or the CAPTCHA Wikipedia article.
First of all a big thank you to everyone who attended the session, and many thanks to Chris O’Brien for his presentation on ECM in SharePoint 2010 and also to Matt Taylor for pulling the strings behind the scenes and getting it organised!
You can find links to all of the Slide Decks and Source Code that was used in the Building Accessible SharePoint Systems session below.
There is loads of material, with links to all of the tools and websites I mentioned including the Disability Discrimination Act, the WCAG 2.0 and WAI ARIA guidelines, the new online SharePoint 2010 SDK and the ASP.Net 4.0 Whitepaper … plus links to all of the tools that were mentioned.
The slides also include notes on each of the topics and the demo notes refer to the source files that were used in the demo!
In the mean time if anyone wants to contact me with any questions feel free to use the medium of your choice:
Email: martin.hatch@contentandcode.com
Twitter: @MartinHatch
Cheers, thanks for coming and hope to see you all again soon!
Files
Let me know if you have any trouble accessing them.
Otherwise you can get the individual files below:
[Update – some of the links were broken before – fixed now!]
Thanks again!
Well it seems not. Microsoft have really pulled out all of the stops this time around, with standards compliant, cross browser compatibility and even accessibility hitting the conference headlines.
The first item of note is that SharePoint 2010 aims to be W3C XHTML compliant. This is a massive leap towards making SharePoint 2010 a truly robust platform, worthy of both internet facing sites and global internal systems.
I saw a demo of an embedded video in the Monday afternoon Web Content Management session where a video was streamed from a Document Library (another new SharePoint 2010 feature) and it was loaded in FireFox with no plugins or downloads, full screen streaming and buffering.
But the biggest impact is bound to be around the statement that one of the major release goals for the SharePoint 2010 release is that the entire interface of SharePoint 2010 meets WCAG 2.0 AA compliance! This includes editing and authoring of content! This is absolutely massive, and represents a huge push from Microsoft to really respond to the community feedback that accessibility is a subject to be taken seriously.
Of course, there is bound to be community discussions around the ideology that "compliant" is not the same as "accessible" (which we at Content and Code know all too well, having developed several systems for the RNIB) but this is still a massive step forward and certainly shows a continuing respect of standards from Microsoft and good news for the future of compliant software.
"Accessibility is mandatory for many organisations, allowing access to the web for all. Our SharePoint 2007 Accessibility Framework allows sites to be built rapidly without sacrificing SharePoint functionality."
– Tim Wallis, CEO, Content and Code
By all means check it out and tell me what you think 🙂
https://www.contentandcode.com/solutions/Pages/accessibility.aspx