First 100% Webrichtlijnen (WCAG 1.0 Priority 2+) compliant SharePoint site - almost there

As I have recently mentioned, here at Imtech ICT Business Solutions we are busy with first 100% Webrichtlijnen compliant Internet facing web site based on SharePoint 2007. Earlier this week we have finished the development en begun testing the solution. Yes, we have discovered a few undocumented features which we have immediately resolved. Anyway testing for compliancy with the Dutch government’s guidelines was a serious part of this project and it was my job to achieve this goal.

As I have mentioned earlier I have developed a toolkit which helps gaining enough control over the generated page output just to make it compliant and yet still working. Furthermore I have taken a look at the response of each request and decided to clean this one as well. As a result I have taken the response size from 788kB down to 303kB! That’s more than 50% per request on the home page only!

During the development we did have to consider the compliancy. For a moment it looked like we would be getting problems with custom controls’ events linked through in-line JavaScript. Using our client side script library we have succeeded to preserve the same link using unobtrusive JavaScript though.

The last one were the Web Parts. I have to admit: I have hoped AKS would help me on this one. A bunch of good guys working on a serious compliancy solution for SharePoint and they have admitted there would come over 20 Control Adapters shipped with AKS. When I got the AKS release in my hands and installed it, I really got disappointed: yes there are 25 Control Adapters inside AKS and nope: not even one for the Web Part Zone! Because the Render method of the SharePoint’s Web Part Zone is obfuscated there is no way to have a look at the way Microsoft deals with the rendering. I hoped HiSoftware would have access to that part of SharePoint and would do some good job on it. Unfortunately not, not even a trace of it. As giving up on the compliancy challenge wasn’t really an option for me, I have decided to give it a try myself and deal with it myself. The outcome? I will present it tonight @ DIWUG. And for those of you who are not going to attend this session: keep watching this blog.