First step, Reality Check!
Currently I am working on several solutions on top of SP2010 that aim to conform with WCAG 2.0 AA. First step , a reality check to see how far SharePoint has confirmed to the guidelines specially after Ballmer's keynote and several important blog posts
See:
Steps:
- Open an out of the box team site
- View page source
- Open W3C Validation Service
- Choose Validate by Direct Input
- Copy the page source and paste in the markup textbox in the validation service page.
- Click Check
- Wait for the results!!
Results
280 Errors, 38 Warnings
Concerns?!!
WCAG 2.0 AA is divided in four principles Perceivable, Operable, Understand and Robust (POUR) and three levels of conformance
- A - lowest
- AA
- AAA - highest
“Principle 4: Robust - Content must be robust enough that it can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies.
Guideline 4.1 Compatible: Maximize compatibility with current and future user agents, including assistive technologies.
Understanding Guideline 4.1
4.1.1 Parsing: In content implemented using markup languages, elements have complete start and end tags, elements are nested according to their specifications, elements do not contain duplicate attributes, and any IDs are unique, except where the specifications allow these features. (Level A)
Note: Start and end tags that are missing a critical character in their formation, such as a closing angle bracket or a mismatched attribute value quotation mark are not complete.”
Pasted from <http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG/>
As you can see this is a level A requirement which is very basic.
- Scanning through the errors we is what you can find:
- Line 18, Column 207: document type does not allow element "script" here
- Line 22, Column 32: document type does not allow element "script" here
- Line 35, Column 14: Attribute "scroll" is not a valid attribute. Did you mean "scrolling" or "scope"?
- Line 205, Column 193: Attribute "aria-describedby" is not a valid attribute
- Line 205, Column 248: Attribute "role" is not a valid attribute. Did you mean "frameborder" or "scrolling"?
- Line 209, Column 405: element "ie:menuitem" undefined
- Line 228, Column 287: required attribute "alt" not specified
- Line 237, Column 825: duplicate specification of attribute "unselectable
- Line 916, Column 5830: end tag for "table" which is not finished
- Line 975, Column 116: element "font" undefined. Did you mean "font" or "basefont"?
- Line 237, Column > 80: XML Parsing Error: xmlParseEntityRef: no nam
- Line 916, Column > 80: XML Parsing Error: Specification mandate value for attribute nowrap
- Line 916, Column > 80: XML Parsing Error: Opening and ending tag mismatch: div line 851 and tr
I think I have did what any customer /client would have done. Test the output with a validation service, in specific the official W3C validation service.
With that number and type of errors , it should raise some concerns about SharePoint 2010 conformance with WCAG 2.0 AA. Rendering HTML that conforms to XHTML 1.0 is very basic if you want to support WCAG and specially cross platform browses. How so you expect Safari, Firefox or a mobile browser render an “ie:menuitem element”? Perhaps there is a different rendering to each browser!!…Hope not.
Next Steps
- SharePoint 2010 is still Beta 2, I assume/ hope that this gets enhanced in the release.
- Need to experiment more with SharePoint against WCAG 2.0 AA.
- Test with industry recommended ATs such as JAWs and Web Eyes.
Get Involved
What are your Accessibility Findings?
Mohamed Yehia