Professional SharePoint® 2007 Web Content Management Development: Building Publishing Sites with Office SharePoint Server 2007

Chapter 9. Accessibility

Accessibility is a popular and relevant topic as more and more companies leverage the Internet as a vehicle for their business. With the growing popularity of SharePoint — specifically, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007, used as both a collaboration tool and to facilitate the creation of content-centric sites — accessibility is now a very important factor in evaluating SharePoint for many organizations.

In the past, SharePoint has not had a great track record regarding creating accessible implementations. One challenge involved in creating accessible SharePoint sites was that it required modifying many files. In addition, some of the underlying rendering components could not be customized easily — and often it was not even possible.

While the latest release of SharePoint does not ship conforming to any specific standards out-of-the-box (OOTB), the new layered architecture makes it much easier to customize the rendered output. This makes it possible to create accessible solutions that meet accepted guidelines. In addition, Microsoft has teamed with one of their partners in order to provide a jump-start on creating accessible sites. The Accessibility Kit for SharePoint provides not only a significant number of components that can be reused, but also a fantastic educational opportunity to understand some different approaches to creating accessible Publishing sites.

This chapter does not walk through the process of creating an accessible site ...