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The accessibility kit for SharePoint: a community-based approach to web accessibility

Published: 21 April 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight.
The Accessibility Kit for SharePoint (AKS) is an add-on pack for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 that provides accessibility and usability enhancements for SharePoint. This development effort was broken into two parts (a) standing up a more accessible web-site in an effort to accelerate the process of building accessible Web sites in SharePoint in accordance with the WCAG 1.0 AA guidelines and (b) enhancing the accessibility of the collaborative environment within SharePoint, including blogs and Wikis, to meet the guidelines in a similar fashion. The AKS is developed by HiSoftware in collaboration with and on behalf of Microsoft.
The product was designed to be partner-led to allow the partners specific examples through the use of best practices and documentation.
As part of the project, Microsoft and HiSoftware are co-hosting and nurturing an AKS Community. The AKS Community site allows Microsoft Partners, customers and stakeholders to engage in dialogue with each other and Microsoft about Accessibility best practices, lessons learned challenges and successes.
This community-based approach to accessibility has generated a great deal of enthusiasm, including approximately 1000 downloads in the first month and 150 organizations joining the community. This community approach to accessibility for a particular authoring environment has applicability to the broader field of web accessibility.

References

[1]
Accessibility at Microsoft. Retrieved March 20, 2008, Web site: http://www.microsoft.com/enable/
[2]
Chisholm, W., Vanderheiden, G., Jacobs, I. (1999, May 5). Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. Retrieved March 20, 2008, from W3C Web site: http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/
[3]
CSS Friendly Control Adapters. Retrieved March 20, 2008, from CodePlex Web site: http://www.codeplex.com/cssfriendly
[4]
Gray, R., Liu, L. Simberkoff, D. The Accessibility Kit for SharePoint. Retrieved March 20, 2008, from epractice.eu Web site: http://www.epractice.eu/cases/2526
[5]
HiSoftware Accessibility Compliance Solutions for Microsoft SharePoint® Server. Retrieved March 20, 2008, from HiSoftware Web site: http://www.hisoftware.com/MOSS/MOSSsolutions.htm
[6]
Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL). Retrieved March 20, 2008, from Open Source Initiative Web site: http://opensource.org/licenses/ms-pl.html
[7]
The Accessibility Kit for SharePoint (AKS) Community Portal. Retrieved March 20, 2008, from The AKS Community Portal Web site: http://aks.hisoftware.com
[8]
The Official Blog of the SharePoint Product Group. Retrieved March 20, 2008, from Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog Web site: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/
[9]
Yonaitis, Robert B. (2002). Understanding Accessibility. Nashua, NH: HiSoftware Publishing

Cited By

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  • (2008)Guiding accessibility issues in the design of websitesProceedings of the 26th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication10.1145/1456536.1456550(65-72)Online publication date: 22-Sep-2008

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cover image ACM Conferences
W4A '08: Proceedings of the 2008 international cross-disciplinary conference on Web accessibility (W4A)
April 2008
207 pages
ISBN:9781605581538
DOI:10.1145/1368044
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 21 April 2008

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Author Tags

  1. SharePoint
  2. accessibility
  3. best practices
  4. collaboration
  5. community
  6. extensible

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W4A08
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W4A '08 Paper Acceptance Rate 12 of 29 submissions, 41%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 171 of 371 submissions, 46%

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Cited By

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  • (2008)Guiding accessibility issues in the design of websitesProceedings of the 26th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication10.1145/1456536.1456550(65-72)Online publication date: 22-Sep-2008

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