Web standards & Accessibility – SharePoint Server 2010 deck available

Yesterday we had a great evening here at Mavention talking about web standards and accessibility on the SharePoint platform.

Paul did the kick off talking about the differences between web standards and accessibility and why they are important if you are developing an Internet-facing website. The key takeaway was the importance of accessibility for Internet environments where you never know who will visit your website and which browser, operating system and device he will be using. Implementing web standards and accessibility is therefore very important as it makes the information on the website available to every user in every scenario.

In the second presentation John took over talking about web standards and accessibility challenges in MOSS 2007. For the last few months John and Paul have been working on a new Internet-facing website for a Dutch government organization. As you might have heard, the Dutch government has very high accessibility requirements for Internet-facing websites. By law every website should meet the WCAG 2.0 AA+ requirements. In his presentation John presented the approach that he and Paul chose to deliver an accessible WCM solution on the MOSS 2007 platform. He also presented some great tips & tricks he had to use in order to meet the high accessibility requirements defined by the Dutch government.

I had the honor of delivering the last presentation of the evening discussing the investments around web standards and accessibility in SharePoint 2010. In my session I presented what you get with SharePoint 2010 out of the box and what more do you need in order to achieve full compliance with the web and accessibility standards. The key takeaways for my part of the evening were the great improvements of quality of the markup in SharePoint 2010. Although SharePoint 2010 doesn’t solve all web standards and accessibility related issues, it makes delivering accessible solutions easier than it was in MOSS 2007. So if your customer requires an accessible solution on the SharePoint platform, SharePoint 2010 is the best way to get it done in a supported and manageable fashion.

Below you can find the deck from my session. I would also like to thank all Mavens and our guests for attending the evening: Thank you!

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,MOSS 2007,SharePoint 2010,WCM