The return of Accessibility 2.0: A Million Flowers Bloom

AbilityNet ran their first Accessibility 2.0 event in 2008. This year sees the return of the well received event, which will be held at Microsoft (Victoria, London) on the 22nd September.

Accessibility 2.0, A Million Flowers Bloom is a conference exploring Web 2.0, social media and accessibility. Bringing together industry experts, accessibility specialists and advocates, the event will create a cutting edge day of practical insights, inspiration and networking.

This year’s keynote is from Christian Heilmann, Developer Evangelist at Yahoo! and the co-creator of Easy YouTube, an accessible YouTube player.

“Last year’s Accessibility 2.0 conference was refreshingly tangible and practical, with a strong focus on users and their experiences. This is essential for anyone wanting to make the things they create easier and more accessible for everyone. I’m sure this year’s conference will again provide us with an opportunity for healthy debate, to learn things we didn’t know and enable us to put those things into practice.”

Antonia Hyde, Freelance Web Designer and Consultant

AbilityNet have invited Lisa Herrod to share her knowledge of usability and accessibility for Deaf web users. Lisa is one of the world’s leading experts in this field so she’s being flown over all the way from Sydney, Australia. Lisa will also be running a workshop on Deaf awareness for web teams on the 21st September.

Mark Boulton, one of the most esteemed web designers in the industry will be discussing the huge impact graphic design can have on sighted disabled users. Steve Faulkner, one of the world’s leading experts on WAI-ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative - Accessible Rich Internet Applications) and HTML 5, will also be talking about the cutting edge of technical web accessibility. There will also be two panels, one on Mobile Accessibility and one about the recent transition to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 which Bim Egan from the RNIB Web Access Team will be contributing to.

Accessibility 2.0 promises to be an un-missable opportunity to find out what’s happening at the cutting edge of web accessibility and gain practical insight on how to implement the latest techniques.

“We saw a real change come out of Accessibility 2.0 with the creation of Easy YouTube which in turn prompted Scripting Enabled proving that Accessibility 2.0 wasn’t ‘just another accessibility conference’. I’m looking forward to seeing what comes out of this years conference with its focus on design, mobile web, Deafness and emerging technologies such as WAI-ARIA and HTML 5″.

Henny Swan, Web Evangelist Opera

The event will take place in a fully accessible venue and BSL interpreters will be available on request. You can book tickets on the AbilityNet website.

We hope to see many of you there!

Stackoverflow dev day London – Roundup

I’ve just gotten back from a great day at the Stackoverflow Dev Day, I didn’t take my usual copious notes, but I thought a flavour of proceedings would be good to get down. For those who don’t know me, I have to add the caveat that I’m not a programmer (kind of like ‘I’m not a laywer’), so I’m somewhat baised by my background in usability and front-end code.

Joel Spolsky – Keynote

Joel’s keynote was on the theme of simplicity vs power, or rather, the third way.

I’m afraid that this is my interpretation entirely from memory, but essentially:

• A couple of fundamental assumptions are that users do not like to make decisions, and that just about every design decision should lead to the user being more likely to get laid.


• There has been a great upswing in simple interfaces, at least partially lead by 37signals. (Perhaps another contributory factor is the rise of internet applications? Services that can do one thing well.)


• However, some types of commercial applications (e.g. bug trackers) will need to cover the 80% of features that aren’t covered by these ‘simple’ applications. Alhtough 80% of people use 20% of the features, they are often different features. Otherwise you are cutting off too many people.


• Creating elegant code often takes more time and thought that simply typing out standard code. NB: Elegant was defined as doing things well, and making it look effortless.


• Creating elegant interfaces also takes more work, both in creating the UI and often more so in the coding behind it.
  
  A good example is the Amazon one-click. When you move form the (standard?) method of click, then confirmation screen (then rest of checkout process), you suddenly have more work to do. For example, queuing the order (in case they order more things), allowing undo within a certain time, making sure there’s a default address etc.


• Rather than not adding features to keep an interface simple, keep it simple by not forcing the user to make decisions. The interface should certainly start simple, but allow it to be extended, perhaps on a per client/site basis.

Joel’s assertions certainly match my experience with Content Management Systems, which are probably the hardest and least solved programming / interface problem. Whilst 37Signals have been very successful, I don’t see them tackling CMSs any time soon…)

Michael Sparks – Python

Michael essentially took us through the finer points of Python by demonstrating how you can create the Google-style spelling match function, in 21 lines of code (plus a few books worth of content in text files).

It was really good to see an expert use the Python interpreter well (including running into a couple of problems, and solving them). I’d never really understood how you use it for complex functions before, for example, indentation matters in Python, and you put it in a command line?? Anyway, that explains the spaces being preferred to tabs thing, and it will certainly help in my dealings with Django. Hopefully Michael can post something about it soon, in the meantime the code is available.

Joel Spolsky – Fogbugz

We had plenty of Joel time today, this was his demo of Fogbugz, where it’s a disservice to describe it as bug-tracking software. It’s obviously modelled on Joel’s copious experience in developing software, and includes things like Bayesian driven email direction, and predicting launch times better than developers. I’m not sure it would work for us (juggling 15 web projects at the same time), but it will certainly make me wish for more next time I look at Trac or Bugzilla.

Reto Meir – Android

I have to admit, the technical side of mobile application development (rather than mobile web development) is still pretty intimidating for me, and doesn’t particularly float my boat. Reto also needs to either increase the font size in Eclispe, or use the ‘only when the cursor reaches the edge’ settings in OS X’s accessibility preferences.

From doing previous presentations I’ve learned the hard way to:

• practice it at 800×600 resolution,


• check it in 1024, and


• even if the projector supports more, keep it to 1024!

On the positive side, it was good to see some use of Google moderator. Not only does it make it easy to ask questions (and for people to vote up the best questions), Reto answered the top ones on the spot, and has since answered them all.

Remy Sharp – jQuery

Remy gave good talk on jQuery (presentation), something I’ve used quite a bit. It was great to include how to creat a plugin, and it explained a few things I’d seen around but didn’t understand. I liked Remy’s approach to the brief of using code,

The things that most interested me were:

• Having looking up “equality without type coersion” (the triple equals).


• jsbin.com looks like a very useful service.


• There’s a good IRC channel for getting help.


• How to add a plugin to jQuery.

Jeff Atwood – Stackoverflow

Jeff’s talk was less on code, and more the experiences around Stackoverflow, I can’t remember of it much specifically, but after listening to lots of podcasts it’s good to put a face to the voice!

Pekka Kosonen - Qt

Pekka’s presentation on Qt was intriguing, partly for the upfront honesty (tackling people’s scepticism about platforms from Nokia), and partly because of the possibilities of Qt.

Although Nokia was presenting about Qt, the platform itself is not originally from Nokia, in fact, it is designed to build cross-OS applications, desktop and mobile. Applications such as Skype and Google Earth have been built with it, so it seems that it can produce native looking applications.

It looks like you have to go whole-hog into Qt development, it’s an SDK, IDE and they may even have server-side compiling of code to for platforms you don’t have. The demo wasn’t incredibly convincing, but it does seem like a an option to investigate if you need to develop desktop/mobile applications across several platforms. See also getjar.

Phil Nash – iPhone

Phil’s presentation on iPhone development wasn’t quite what I expected, it took us through a short history of the language that iPhone development uses (Objective-C), before creating a little app from scratch. Phil’s dry sense of humour and occasionally cheesy slides helped make the first half more entertaining, especially as I wasn’t really target audience and haven’t quite got the different versions of C straight yet.

The outline of Objective C drew a few gasps: garbage collection? It seemed most of the audience are used to higher level languages, and Objective C seems like a step backwards.

However, the impression was improved a great deal once Phil opened up Xcode and put together a quick application. Phil was the only mobile developer who managed this. As well as the support of the IDE, emulation is obviously easier for the iPhone than Android or Qt, because you’re targeting a much more narrow range of devices.

Jon Skeet – Humanity: Epic Fail

The ‘phenomenal’ Jon Skeet presented a very funny look at why programming is generally hard, based on a rant he had recently about time zones. There isn’t much for me to say on this, but it’s worth checking out the presentation and audio on the Stackoverflow podcast soon.

Paul Biggar – How not to design a scripting language

I hadn’t really expected much of this talk, essentially what’s wrong with modern compilers, however, Paul’s enthusiasm really carried it.

Christian Heilmann – Yahoo! Developer Tools

For me the best was saved until last. I haven’t seen Christian talk on this before, and despite reading about Yahoo! pipes and YQL, I just hadn’t really groked it before.

It doesn’t really hit home until you see someone put an example together in front of you, but the upshot is that there are about a 100 APIs (everything from Amazon to Weather) that you don’t need to read.

You select a data source from the right of the console, adjust the ‘selector’, the YQL statement top left, and preview the results in the middle.

If the result is good, then copy the URL from the top right box, and use that with your backend (or ajax/ajaj), and hey-presto.

Example uses are:

• Showing all your disparate content on other sites in one place, for which Christian’s site is a prime example. It’s basically built with YQL, virtually all the content is from other sites! (Presentations, videos, books, blog articles etc.)


• YQLAutoTagger – automatic tag generation with a single line of JavaScript.


• Translate tweets.


• Create a set of Flickr photos from a particular geo-location.


• You can even scrape HTML for redisplay, narrowing the area using an xpath statement.

It uses a SQL like syntax to allow a great deal of granularity, both in terms of filtering things to get just the information you want, as well as using several input sources (URLs) at the same time.

I am not closing the YQL tab I have in Firefox until I’ve used it somewhere! I think this is the closest video on YQL I’ve seen that covers the same content.

SharePoint 2010 Accessibility Event

The official title was “UK Accessibility Roundtable for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2010″, and was a HiSoftware event at Microsoft‘s offices in London Victoria. HiSoftware produce compliance monitoring software for developing and maintaining sites to prevent accessibility, privacy, quality and security issues. The day revolved around several demos of SharePoint 2010 (SP 2010) and Compliance Sheriff™, and fleshed it out with some quite reasonable accessibility information. These are my notes on the event, with a lot of interspersed commentary. I’m sorry they are so long, but there was a lot of interesting things said!

SharePoint 2007 Landscape

After a quick introduction from Nick Wilson (Managing Director of HiSoftware EMEA), Thomas Logan (HiSoftware VP of Product Management) took a look at the current situation with SharePoint 2007 (SP 2007).

The first point was stating the obvious, but just so everyone knows, Microsoft has been one of the more honest CMS vendors saying SharePoint is Not accessible to a particular standard. Well, to any standard really!

HiSoftware’s Accessibility Kit for SharePoint (AKS) is intended to repair issues with out of the box SharePoint, and also included an accessible Rich Text Editor (RTE).

Thomas demonstrated some of the improvements that the AKS could help with:

• SharePoint 2007 doesn’t allow text resizing (in Internet Explorer). When using AKS and the text can be increased, and it does actually change. However, from where I was sitting it increased by about 30%!? I know IE has some bugs with EMs, but the size really didn’t change very much.


• Thomas went on to show a form where you’re able to add explicit labels to inputs (not possible in SP 2007 in some situations).


• Quick demo of the Accessible RTE (aRTE), navigating in the editor with keyboard, apparently this uses ARIA concepts.

WCAG 2 & ARIA

Thomas called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2 the new global standard (although really it’s guidelines, not a standard).

Thomas notes:

• There is now a heavier reliance on manual testing (despite the W3C’s aim that WCAG 2 be more precisely testable with automated testing.)


• There is a different and more complicated lexicon on information design techniques.


• Frequently overlapping requirements (e.g. forms have things that need to be perceivable/operable etc.)

The presentation showed a spider diagram of principles / guidelines / success criteria / techniques, commenting on how it is a bit of a web of things you need to know. I quite agree with the point that when testing or developing, the sufficient techniques would be better listed by functionality type, however, that isn’t the intent of the core guidelines.

Web accessibility timeline

Thomas showed a diagram of (legally) important milestones in accessibility:

1. WCAG 1 (1999)


2. Section 508 (2000)


3. JIS x8341-1 + other standards


4. Section 508 refresh (2008)


5. WCAG 2 (2008)


6. New Zealand adopts WCAG 2 and EU recommends WCAG 2

NB: HiSoftware have a CD with lots of white papers on laws, regulations, standards and settlement agreements, get in touch with them for a copy.

Apparently a Judge in New York used WCAG 2 (double-A) as the standard that should be met, rather than section 508. I’m not sure if this is a reasonable comparison? If the company in question are a private company then the ADA legislation (using WCAG 2 as a benchmark) would be applicable rather than Section 508. It’s funny how the procurement guidelines (Section 508) are more widely known than the more general law. (Struan Robertson points out the ambiguity of the ADA.)

The next slide was a diagram with national standards as a circle inside the larger WCAG 2. I suspect it would be more accurate to show standards such as BSI 8878 stacked on top of WCAG 2, building on the guidelines.

Testing best practices

Thomas provided some good advice on testing a SharePoint site from HiSoftware’s point of view. (However, I wish people wouldn’t refer to Meeting double-A regulation!)

• Start with most common issues, page templates and style sheets. (Thomas talked about the blessed way of web development being the CSS way.)


• Focus on key scenarios/pages.


• Group related manual test work (i.e. by function rather than by guideline/principle)


• Document work to demonstrate progress.


• Use a representative page from each template.

Something that came across more from the words than the presentation was that it’s an uphill battle. Comments like I’d always like to be 100% complaint, but there’s usually something that can be done better, and comments from an Microsoft Partner later gave a good indication that you really had to pick your battles. My conclusion from the tone would be that a SharePoint 2007 site as a whole was virtually impossible to make fully accessible.

Managing Compliance

Next was a slide with a Venn diagram of automation / documentation / remediation, to manage compliance.

There was a very fundamental point missing though: prevention.

The whole presentation and tone of the day was about fixing things, because we can’t trust people to maintain accessibility.

I agree that regular people (content authors) aren’t going to learn about accessibility, but so what? There are simple things you can do to a CMS interface to prevent problems in the first place.

Still, the event is organised / sponsored by a company who makes compliance management software, so I guess that’s to be expected.

ARIA (and JavaScript required?)

Thomas gave a pretty good (and practical) overview of the WAI-ARIA spec being used in practice. Some people might have found it a bit technical, but it is necessary to know a little about ARIA in order to understand how & why the interface for SharePoint 2010 is accessible.

I won’t go through the rest of the content on ARIA, there are good ARIA introductions elsewhere. However, that’s a pretty fundamental point to think about, SP 2010 was built targeting WCAG 2, and relies on ARIA to implement accessibility (and therefore I would assume it relies on JavaScript).

I assume this applies to the editing / collaboration features rather than the ‘content consumers’ type user.

Personally, given SharePoints product development timelines (3/4 years between versions) I would have made the same decision. Someone in the audience pointed out that not everyone can use the latest screen readers or browsers, and asked what the baseline for SharePoint 2010 was.

Looking at the whole situation in general, there is going to be a bit of a gap for a while, as developers implement sites that require JavaScript and ARIA, and Access Technology (AT) vendors implement support for ARIA. If you are in charge of a mass-market or public sector site, then you should probably make sure the front-end site doesn’t require JavaScript or ARIA. However, until people do implement sites using ARIA, the AT vendors won’t make it a priority.

The accessibility community as a whole needs to realise the implicit decision about which option is better long term:

1. Make sure pages / applications work without JavaScript.


2. Make sure that the JavaScript works with Assistive Technologies (with a baseline of WAI-ARIA).

These are not mutually exclusive, however, in practice they will be because of the effort required to do both.

I firmly believe that the experience for someone using Access Technology should be as close to the mainstream as possible, otherwise developers will overlook issues that affect a minority audience.

Thomas also noted that keyboard access is important, including documenting the features available. I wonder whether SharePoint has (or can) avoid the cross-platform and AT issues with conflicting keyboard commands?

Resources

Thomas showed some good resources that I’ll be digging into:

The DHTML Style Guide is apparently very helpful for people trying to implement accessible JavaScript, and should help harmonise things across sites.

Thomas also recommend AOL’s AXS library, which can automatically associate keyboard commands to mouse commands.

See also codetalks.org and search for ARIA test cases.

A work around demonstrated how to use ARIA to mark layout tables with a role of ‘presentation’. However, that really feels to me like solving the wrong problem.

A demo was going to be the next thing, but network issues got in the way. Thomas did recommend the Juicy Studio toolbar for things like showing where the document landmarks are. JAWs and NVDA have keyboard shortcuts for showing landmarks, other access technologies should follow soon.

A quick tip was that you can have more than one landmark of the same type, but it needs a unique title /ID.

SharePoint 2010

The next section was presented by Tara Hellier, SharePoint Partner technology Advisor, Microsoft UK. (NB: Tara talked relatively quickly, which is good for an engaging presentation, but I may not have got everything down, sorry!)

Tara started off saying that Microsoft (MS) are aware of many issues in 2007. They had to make a decision, adapt it in a large and disruptive way for the 2007 version, or work it into the next one. The decision was to focus on accessibility in the 2010 version.

Goals

The standards (or guidelines) being aiming for in SP 2010 are:

• WCAG 2 AA (again, the terminology is about Compliance grrr.)


• Section 508 + VPATs. Tara said that Microsoft have released some of these self-assessment statement, however, I can only find this VPAT on POS 2009.

Some of the goals for SharePoint 2010 were:

• Make is usable, understandable etc. (i.e. not just technically accessible)


• Make use of “Classic” accessibility:
  
  
  
  • HTML input fields
  
  
  • Labels
  
  
  • Headings (every bit of content has a header, I hope that doesn’t mean over-kill?)
  
  
  • Skip links for repetitive content
  
  
  • Shortcut keys (Uh-oh)
  
  
  • The More accessible mode has been kept, apparently for future-proofing. MS test SharePoint with a lot of ATs, but aren’t sure where they are going in future. (I would have thought that this would actually be for backwards compatibility more than future proofing?)
  
  
  
  


• Use WAI ARIA, as the semantics for dynamic content.


• Markup: Use an XHTML 1.0 strict doctype, with the emphasis on well-formed (rather than valid). Tara said that it’s very difficult to be valid, the product team were going for clean, usable code, and to support ARIA it couldn’t have been valid. To me, this seems to be a bit of mis-direction, I suspect there will be a lot of SharePoint specific attributes (perhaps even tags) that are automatically added.


• No more Quirks
  
  
  
  • Adopted CSS standards for master pages.
  
  
  • Reduce tables (I did note some in a later demo)
  
  
  • Improve cross-browser support. IE 7+, FF 3, and working on Safari 3.x (how about 4.x?). No mention of Chrome / Opera.
  
  
  
  

It’s interesting that they are using the XHTML strict doctype, because that’s likely to make supporting IE6 on the front-end website a little trickier, at least in my experience.

Keyboard shortcuts

The interface is taking a great deal from Office 2007′s ribbon. It has contextual menus, with keyboard shortcuts for the Ribbon keyboard shortcuts, e.g.

• cntl + [ to Jump to tabs


• cntl + [ Jump to last command


• cntl or shift + arrow keys to jump between groups.

There are also other keyboard shortcuts (Accesskeys?), including S for search and W for welcome. Unfortunately I missed the others. It is a bit worrying, unless I'm missing something these could clash horribly with some access technologies.

ARIA is used around the ribbon, for notifications, text editing, grid editing, rich forms, dialogs etc. In regard to text-editing Tara mentioned something about it being wiki-like, but I wasn't sure if this refered to mark-down editing (unlikely) or something else.

Infopath is an associated product that is used for creating forms, and ARIA semantics has been used for the forms.

Uploading a document now includes aria attributes. (Meaning it's not a standard browser dialogue I assume?)

Tara did a quick demo, and I think this was the first time most people had seen SP 2010.

It has Lost the 'charming blue interface', and the top left has a site actions and ribbon interface. The ribbon is contextual, depending on what's on the page, and (I think) what is focused upon within the page.

You can just click to edit and add text, and then you have the ribbon for the editing controls.

The immediate accessibility issue I noted was the priority given to the font-based styling instead of using structured markup. It's the same in Word 2007, because the styles are hidden away, it's makes it much less likely people will use semantic markup like headings. I couldn't see from the interface how you would add a heading!

(Picture taken from the SharePoint 2010 site.)

I'll provide some feedback even before the beta: please please include an option to give semantic elements priority and remove things like font-size / color etc. I've written many articles on the accessibility of WYSIWYG editors, just start there...

The menu includes tooltips, and Graeme Whippy of Lloyds TSB asked if they are available to keyboard users, which Tara wasn't sure about.

Then someone behind me asked if they could install JAWs on the laptop so that they could try it. Now, I can understand some frustration at this stage if you can't see the presentation. However, the question was asked fairly aggressively, and it wasn't something that Tara had control over. No-one was going to get to try it out today, which is partly why much of the presentation was based on screen shots. The issue really came down to 'audio description', I think Tara is new to the accessibility world and wasn't used to describing her slides. (That takes some practice, I still miss things off.)

There was another question along the lines of 'Can you add an image using the keyboard' which Tara wasn't prepared for. I didn't think about it at the time, but the keyboard short-cuts above are exactly how you would do that!

The real answer to these questions was that there will be a public beta of SharePoint 2010 which will be available very soon. It's not exactly easy for most people there to install any version of SharePoint, so Nick at HiSoftware will try to create a test environment and AbilityNet are looking to host clinics to work through the issues.

The call to action was: please try it out and feedback to Microsoft.

'Web Content Creates Risk'

Thomas again, talking about and demoing HiSoftware's products, which cover privacy, accessibility, social media & collaboration, brand 'corruption', and security breaches.

I'll skip the first bit, see HiSoftware's site for the overview.

Thomas showed compliance sherif, which has 233 checkpoints out of the box, but these are customisable and can be added to. It is a bigger number than the guidelines because as well as covering both WCAG 1 and 2 (and non-accessibility things), checkpoints are created for site-specific things.

Many of the checkpoints are based on WCAG 2 techniques. It then uses regular expression logic to spot issues in the pages.

The example used was to build a checkpoint to test that the search has a (visual) label.

Firebug was used to find the classname of the search input. (This is where I spotted layout tables and volumous markup.)

A regular expression creator is used to find that item, and sets the software to search for that control and check for a 'linked element'. It looked relatively easy to use for what it's trying to do, which is quite complex.

It also allows you to set what would be reported, which provides a decent explanations of what it is or isn't finding. (Compared to the standard speil from many accessibility checkers.) As a broad point, I've found that any automated check across a site has to be customised for the site, or it will drown you in 'known' results time after time

The report shows the issues found, and apparently it is quite customisable. For me this seems to be a good approach, as you can specify which techniques are in use on the site and look for those, rather than the nebulous method of looking for generic errors. You could probably have profiles of tests as well, e.g. for HTML based standard sites.

Once the issue is found, the software applies a control adapter, (which takes a little while to reload//build'), then the label has been inserted. It showed a slight layout issue, but considering nothing was done to deal with the layout as part of the demo, this should be fine in practice.

Brian Smith asked why would you need AKS 3.0 if SP 2010 is accessible out of the box?

Thomas replied that AKS 3 is aimed at SP 2007, and could perhaps be used for custom controls in 2010.

There was a question about authoring environment, e.g. why have font type editing:

Thomas replied: That's something that MS would have to answer, but AKS for 2010 would be for things like restricting styles. We aren't at a point yet where we can assess what's needed for that yet.

There was a quick demo of inserting a word document. (I noted the use of Word styles such as headings).

There's a workflow built for this demo into SharePoint (with Compliance Sherif) that checks for things like colour contrast, alt text, and use of headings. Thomas notes that the new workflow model is very powerful. There was also an example checkpoint that highlights incorrect use of a logo in a Document.

Round Table Discussion

Nick Wilson (HiSoftware) hosted, with panellists: Tara (MS), Thomas (HS), Robin Christopherson (AbilityNet), Nikki Ashington (Trinity), and Peter Abrams (Journalist).

I have to stress that this is what I managed to get down, I've probably mis-quoted people. My comments are in [square brackets], and corrections are welcome!

Q to Thomas: Is there a plan to look into (scan) content like graphics?

Thomas: We have started looking at OCR technologies for graphics processing. We don't have that now, but it's a good plan.

Q to Thomas asking if there are plans to integrate with Autonomy?

Thomas: Thats why we created a web API, and were looking at partnerships with people who have different scanning engines.

Q to Nikki: Are people holding back on implementing SharePoint due to compliance issues?

Nikki: It's one of the biggest requests, as we are all aware, but it isn't going to meet double-A compliance, even with the AKS (2). It will meet certain elements but not others. We usually propose to meet them as much as possible and do user testing along side. The only way we can be sure is to test with the widest range of people possible. There are parts of SharePoint we are aware are difficult to make compliant.

Robin, are many people asking about test?

Robin: SharePoint is a tool, so we need to be aware that as soon as a designer touches it, it could be compromised. We (Abilitynet) aren't dogmatic about double-A, what matters is real like accessibility. If there are issues, highlight them but you have to evaluate whether they are issues for real people.For example, we've tested double-A sites with awful IA.

Thomas: Something I've noticed is 3rd party controls / widgets, a lot of the vendors don't have basic accessibility knowledge, so we should be giving them feedback and making sure that isn't a problem. If they build a more accessible/successful solution, that should be more sellable.

Q to Peter: What about procurement?

Peter: Anyone looking at developing new sites should include accessibility as a requirement. It's not just the public sector, the accessibility community has to explain the issues to the private sector as well. As new tools come out, like SharePoint, making it easier, this is is a good thing.Going back to the other questions, people are waiting for SP 2010 because of accessibility. Therefore it's important that people take advantage of the beta testing so we don't have to wait again! Don't wait until it's finished!

Q: Does anyone have first hand experiences in implementing SP 2007, what should we keep in mind?

Nikki: There are a lot of current issues. The the reason we have this association [with Microsoft] is because I grumbled a lot about the accessibility. Obvious things include:

• Accessible master pages & layouts are needed.


• Resizing fonts is still difficult to achieve. But with newer browsers having zoom, do we ignore that?


• AKS isn't a silver bullet, but it does help, Compliance Sherif is a big help with that as well.

Q: We've gone through a lot of pain (and testing) to get where we are now. What pain would we have moving to 2010? [The migration question!]

Thomas: I don't have the migration information, but I'm sure that's something that is being worked on.

Tara: There are two ways:

• Migrate it 'intact' with the same look and feel. [I would assume that this means not benefiting from the update, in accessibility terms, at least for the front-end site.]


• Migrate it with the 2010 look and feel. This is where most of the issues will come along.

That's something our partners will be looking at.

Unfortunately we can't promise perfect migration, but we do have great partners who deal with accessibility and can help.

Q: What about the Content web-adapter that we have customised?

Thomas: With the RTE in 2010 being much better for AT, we're still assessing it, and that will be part of the decision process.

Tara: We've had some experience with partners and people already migrating sites. We'll try and publish that feedback, what sort of issues they've had. Keep an eye on the community.

Q: There's a lot of the talk of Silverlight in Sp 2010, what's the story on that being accessible?

Tara: We've really integrated Silverlight in 2010, there are some things out of the box that have been developed with WCAG 2 in mind. In 2007 it was a bit of an afterthought, it's now much better integrated.

Thomas: In terms of scanning, we can parse XAML markup, but we haven't got customers who use Silverlight yet, so it hasn't come up for us.

Q: Does it have a browser and AT baseline?

Tara: I can't give you and answer on that, I'll chat with people internally and feedback via HiSoftware.

Thomas: I'd just like to recommend NVDA, a free tool with the most complaint experience [Arrgg!]

Robin: It's fantastic for testing, and in some ways it's better than JAWs for the browsing experience, definitely watch this space. However, it's not an 'enterprise' screen reader, and doesn't have good support for applications such as Excel / Powerpoint. Therefore the adoption is going to be limited on the wider scale. With Jaws, developers tend to use it in 40 minute mode for testing, so for testing NVDA is very good. As the lady pointed out though, being better than the common tool can be a problem! It's a tricky problem, I would use things like JavaScript and ARIA but not rely on them!

Ouch, Robin's last comment sort of undermines the approach the SharePoint team have taken. However, as I outlined above, I think they've done the right (and necessary) thing.

Conclusions

Overall, SharePoint 2010 looks fairly promising, there have been some major changes and accessibility has been a stated goal of the development. The real test will be the reports when people get their hands on the beta.

A frustration for me was the pervading attitude and terminology around 'compliance', not just from HiSoftware but from Microsoft people as well. Compliance shouldn't be why people create accessible sites and products. For example, post-content checks will become an annoyance to be bypassed for regular content authors. My company Nomensa produce a Content Management System called Defacto. It's not really in the same market as SharePoint, yet, but the principles of the interface design should be similar. We concentrated on making it so that people produce accessible content, and how many post-authoring checks for accessibility or mentions of 'compliance' do you think we have? Zero.

Prevention is key, and that comes down to the authoring interface, so that's what I'll be looking for when the beta comes out.

Another observation is that questions on access technology baseline (from the audience) are a little misleading, the idea with WCAG 2 is to have technology baselines, which Microsoft have been very clear about.

A worrying trend I noticed in how people were dealing with SharePoint 2007's (lack of) accessibility was the reliance on usability testing. Don't get me wrong, usability testing is almost always a good thing to do, I come from a psychology & HCI background after all. However, the method isn't suited to saying whether something is accessible or not, unless you run a lot of tests. The guidelines are essentially 'an expression of potential problems and solutions' (from Universal Design), derived from wide-spread feedback and usability testing, and they remain the best way to evaluate whether something will be generally accessible. With that baseline, usability testing with people who have disabilities is a fantastic way to prioritise which issues are most important.

The most important issue that I remain unconvinced about, is the fact that accessibility in SharePoint 2010 still looks like it's extra work.

The best way to make sure accessibility is incorporated is to make it the default way of developing things.

Law Office of Lainey Feingold

Law Office of Lainey Feingold, the business site of disability rights lawyer Lainey Feingold, was designed by Mike Cherim specifically to conform to the level of AAA under the WCAG 2.0. And having already officially achieved this status, there was hope we might have our first Timeless Universal Design Award on our hands!

Web Perfectionist

The Web Perfectionist site was designed by Irina Ponomareva to be clean, elegant, easy to use and accessible to all.

We found it to be a very solid, well coded, accessible site.

Nine Accessible Steps To Search Engine Optimisation

There are many design considerations when creating or re-designing a Web site.

• Corporate branding.


• Providing quality content for your visitors.


• Ensuring that the site is accessible via a range of different devices to users with varying needs.

However, all of this is going to be pretty pointless unless people have a reasonable chance of finding your site via Google or another search engine. Enter the art of Search Engine Optimisation or 'SEO' for short.

Detecting touch-based browsing

Please note, the method I outlined used ontouchmove, which was also picked up by Google Chrome 6. I changed it to use ongesturestart, which excluded Chrome 6. Now Chrome 7 (windows) does not pick up ontouchmove or ongesturestart.

I came across a situation recently where a JavaScript widget didn’t ‘work’ on the iPhone. It did technically work, but without knowing about two-fingered scrolling (and when you need to use it), it didn’t appear to work. So how do you differentiate the iPhone (and other touch based devices) from a regular browser?

Well, we all know object detection beats browser detection, but what object would you detect?

The issue in this case was with the Stylish Select jQuery pluggin. It replaces a standard drop-down with a nicer looking one. It is reasonably accessible as well, supporting keyboard use.

However, it creates a div with overflow of auto and a fixed height, which in desktop browsers creates a scroll bar. In the iPhone, it looks as though you can only select the ones that are initially visible, because there is no scroll bar.

In this case there is a nice fall-back: the select box that the JavaScript is replacing. The iPhone (and I assume other mobile browsers) show this in a system-native way.

So the question becomes how do you detect that a touch-based device is in use?

The solution came from this article on Detecting event support without browser sniffing, however, it does more than I was looking for, and wasn’t aimed at touch based detection.

I put together a little script that so far, seems to do what I’d like:

function isTouchDevice() {
  var el = document.createElement('div');
  el.setAttribute('ongesturestart', 'return;');
  if(typeof el.ongesturestart == 'function'){
     return true;
  }else {
     return false
  }
}

Currently this script gives good results for:

• IE8 / Win (no event detected)


• FF 3.6 / Win (no)


• Chrome / Win (no)


• iPhone 4.0 (yes)

I originally picked ontouchmove as a fairly advanced touch event, but Google’s Chrome started firing for that event. I’ve moved to ongesturestart which works for now, but may also be used in Chrome later.

If you have another device or browser, please try the test page and let me know the results.