Accessible SharePoint 2007: It's now officially 100% Webrichtlijnen(NL)/WCAG compliant
Yesterday I have found out that the bug we have found while testing our compliancy toolkit, is fixed. What you see now is the nice green 100%.
After I have published the first post about our SharePoint Compliancy toolkit I have realised that I haven’t mentioned what the Webrichtlijnen actually is. As it’s a Dutch product it doesn’t have to be necessarily obvious to everybody what it contains.
Webrichtlijnen is a set of accessibility guidelines created on behalf of the Dutch government. In 2006 the Dutch government has noticed the increase of digital information systems hosted by Dutch government organisations. What’s more they have notice the lack of accessibility implemented in these applications and websites. As they are supposed to improve the access to information and the involved business processes accessibility has become all of a sudden a must-have.
After a research the Dutch government has found out that there only a few companies capable of designing and developing accessible websites and that implementing it isn’t that obvious, they have decided to define the guidelines for accessible websites. In their work they have used the WCAG 1.0 guidelines as a primary input. Unfortunately they have chosen for their own set of guidelines which is WCAG 1.0 Priority 2+ (1, 2 plus some guidelines from 3). And I mean unfortunately because there is no way at this moment to check whether your site is Webrichtlijnen compliant other than using the on-line scan tool they have developed.
Anyway after a research we have succeeded in making SharePoint 2007 based Web Content Management solutions Webrichtlijnen compliant. It also means our toolkit is capable of making SharePoint solutions WCAG compliant!
In the nearest future we are going to test our toolkit more in different situations and environments and we are going to extend it with extra features. I hope I will be able to share some more technical details with you really soon and in the meanwhile I await some interesting questions.