Accessibility and SharePoint 2010

Standards

As a starting point, SharePoint adopted the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, WCAG 2.0, and set a goal for Level AA. Becoming a W3C recommendation on December 11^th, 2008, WCAG 2.0 defines the expectations of and the techniques deployed in well-built, accessible Web sites. The SharePoint teams followed the spec’s developments, and we designed and tested SharePoint 2010 against the guidelines. WCAG 2.0 represents a modern, international standard that’s as valuable to developers as it is to Web users.

Core Investments

The four principles of WCAG 2.0 are Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust. For each area, SharePoint has made key investments, and here I’ll scratch the surface to describe a few:

Percievable

• SharePoint 2010 delivers broad changes to describe content and media and to explain controls.
• The redesigned masterpage leverages CSS and presents content in the appropriate sequence.

Operable

• Keyboard interaction has been a cornerstone in our feature evaluations to maximize device compatibility and usability.
• Proper heading structures have been added to pages for informational, organizational, and navigational benefits.
• Core to a trustworthy interface is a dependable focus, and we’ve invested heavily in protecting the users focus and in deferring control to the user agent wherever possible.

Understandable

• Across SharePoint, we’ve improved language support, and we’ve integrated this information into our pages and into our advanced editors.
• SharePoint supports browser settings to zoom content and operating system features to increase font sizes.

Robust

• Our new design efforts let us declare DocTypes and specify CSS-standards rendering for our masterpages. This has dramatically improved our cross-browser support.
• Broad investments were made to update our markup to be like well-formed XML, and the new rich text editor has clean markup and a function to convert its content into XHTML.

We’ve tested these principles with and without Assistive Technologies to verify their value for all users.

ARIA Integration

ARIA stands for Accessible Rich Internet Applications, and it specifies descriptive extensions for Web applications. Like WCAG, WAI-ARIA is from the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative. In a nutshell, ARIA allows an inaccessible element, such as a div with an onclick attribute, to surface itself as a button control. This can be done with a new role attribute set to “button”—it’s that simple. SharePoint leverages ARIA in the Ribbon, in dialogs, in our new rich text editor, and elsewhere in the platform and in partner applications.

Examples of other Accessibility Investments: 

Dialogs, the ribbon, keyboard support, tab access, command access, enhanced tooltips, ARIA Integration, InfoPath Forms, assistive technology friendly, project grid editing, and keyboard navigation.