SharePoint 2007 accessibility

Sharepoint screen shot I attend my first Microsoft (MS) oriented user group meeting yesterday, the [SharePoint User Group](http://suguk.org/) on search and accessibility. Unfortunately our developers werre either too busy or on holiday, so I got volunteered.

The meeting was at an LBi office in London, and had a great start with free pizza's & beer, which after my three hours of travel was a very welcome sight. The topics up were SharePoint 2007's (SP) search, and creating an accessible web site.

The first part on search went mostly went over my head, not due to the presenter (Riaz Ahmed), but because I'm really not an MS developer. It was quite funny though when Riaz asked the audience how many people used MS's Live search, and three people put their hands up (out of around 50 MS developers?).

The presentation is up now, and the main thing that struck me in this part was how many damn servers you need to use, the minimum in any of the diagrams was three (web site, search & database). The example used was for LBi's intranet, where SharePoint 2007 enterprise search was used to index about 6 million documents on a file system, several thousand wiki pages, some blogs, and the 'people'.

One relevant (to me) question at the end of the search presentation was whether you could filter the search terms to prevent SQL injections. In this example it wasn't really an issue due to being an Intrant, but they had used JavaScript to filter the search terms. This lead onto 'is sharepoint reliant', to which the reply was Yes and no, it depends how you architect it.

Method for Creating an Accessible SharePoint Site

After outlining their typical development team, Riaz suggested that it should be the 'Experience Architect' (aka Information Architect, Usability person, Interface designer etc.) who after suitable training should own the:

These are all things in SharePoint with relatively easy interfaces to control, and this represents quite a good direction for things to go.

Their development environment includes:

Apparently you also need you own SP farm!?

Issues

The main issues they had found with the default output from SP were complete lack of valid code, custom attributes, and inline styles.

I have to say, I really got the impression that for them, accessibility = valid HTML. This might be unfair, I'll wait until the site goes live before commenting further (about structural code, alternative text etc.). This is not the new site yet.

Solution

They looked at several ways of controlling the code, and after an unsuccessful attempt with 'Web Parts', settled on filtering the output. Andrew Lister was quite funny and approachable, despite the obviously depressing content of the topic.

So, for any non-authenticated user, the content goes through a filter that strips out the rubbish. Obviously this put some overhead on the system, so they instituted caching, and asked Microsoft about a better solution.

Apparently Microsoft said wait until the next version, to which an audience member said They've been saying that since version 1!. (Alun David has been asking for about 6/7 years.)

The implications of this approach (and I certainly don't have a better approach, this isn't a critisim) are:

For functions like the survey, they wrote a module from scratch, which is what you would have to do for any function. The normal SP functions are used for back-end functionality, but Riaz estimated it was 80% .Net development, and 20% SP development.

They will be doing another session in the near future that will go into more of the technical details.

I also have to wonder about the interface of the content editor, does anyone know how configurable that is?

Q & A

In the questions and answers it turned out that some people were working on making accessible Intranets, and had been talking about the issues with Microsoft. Apparently there have been some rumblings going up the food chain at MS in the last few weeks, I wonder if Molly's post had anything to do with that?

Most people were pretty hacked off that MS hasn't done anything about this, and if people using SP are hacked off, perhaps MS will listen. From the comments the best way to register complaints is through SharePoint NVPs (whatever they are).

Most CMSs started working on making sure they could output decent code a couple of years ago (with various level of success), but since SharePoint 2007 is now Microsoft's primary CMS product, the question is: when will they start trying to catch up?

Further reading