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Accessibility may affect feasibility of Sharepoint intranet

— Microsoft's Office Sharepoint Server 2007 packs some cosmetic improvements to accessibility, but considerable development will be needed to resolve out-of-the-box problems.”

Improvements in MOSS Sharepoint 2007

Microsoft applies accessibility best practice fairly solidly on the desktop, but the same couldn’t be said of its recent online efforts.

Redmond has often been seen to lag behind the rest of the online industry and resentments have built up over the years, particularly fuelled by the development of Internet Explorer.

So it’ll be welcome news from Microsoft that Sharepoint 2003 – a release pockmarked by deficiencies in both usability and accessibility – has been replaced by Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007, complete with numerous interface improvements.

However what we’re seeing are quick wins rather than big changes: some attention has been given to (easily altered) markup and the visual styles of out-of-the-box skins.

For better or for worse?

MOSS: hasn’t aged so well

The origins of Sharepoint’s critical accessibility issues – and these are still more or less the same in MOSS 2007 as they were in Sharepoint 2003 – lie in Microsoft’s dogged commitment to delivering the functional equivalent of WinForms in a browser.

The practical result is a sort of Frankenstein’s Monster of desktop and web paradigms, onerously dependent on client-side scripting to hold it all together.

Closer inspection of this scripting suggests that MOSS 2007 is in fact potentially less accessible than 2003.

An uphill slog

If we can do without bells and whistles on the front-end, it’s not especially difficult to publish a semantically valid, usable and accessible Sharepoint intranet.

It’s just that we have to customise to comply, to the extent that the cost-benefit of Sharepoint is much diminished by the considerable resources required to make it seaworthy.

Administrative concerns

Assuming we’re ready to receive visitors to our newly-compliant Sharepoint front-end, let’s turn to that Microsoft speciality: the delegation of administration. Here’s where the complexity of transferring WinForms literalism to the web starts to take its toll.

The technology required to leverage the power of the Sharepoint’s administration interface is also the heartbeat of the product, but some assistive technologies won’t support it. An assistive technology user can access a carefully modified website, but she won’t feasibly be able to administer it. Unless, it seems, we’re prepared to put our hand in our pocket again.

The cost of concessions: “More Accessible Mode” and the Accessibility Kit for Sharepoint

In his article on expected accessibility improvements for MOSS 2007, Microsoft’s Lawrence Liu envisaged a “‘more accessible’ mode that allows users with special needs to identify themselves so that we can change the way some of our dynamic content is rendered” (note the choice of the phrase “more accessible”, rather than plain “accessible”).

Indeed, now that we have the finished product, Liu’s follow-up remark is more accurate, with the ‘more accessible mode’ being made available “… so that third parties can create solutions catered to screen reader users”. The implication being that “more accessible” properly equates to “more development”: this mode still appears to depend upon at least some out-of-the-box client-side scripting to function properly.

A requirement for extra development in MOSS 2007 is honestly acknowledged by Microsoft, though Redmond obviously stops short of seeing that as a potential negative.

Some organisations have made the investment: there is a collection in the public domain today of websites (numbers still in single figures) that have been created to meet accessible standards. And it’s clear that in these examples, MOSS 2007′s rich functionality is missing. Nor can we guess whether or not these examples are capable of being administered accessibly.

As the respected creator of accessibility test engine CynthiaSays, provider and vendor HiSoftware has partnered with Microsoft to develop an Accessibility Kit for Sharepoint (AKS), which will target MOSS 2007. AKS will “deliver a kit that can significantly reduce the time, knowledge, and effort required to implement a Sharepoint-based web site”, say Microsoft and HiSoftware in a joint statement.

There are at the time of writing no published release dates.

While-U-Wait: Master Pages, User Controls and Web Parts

In the meantime, general experience of .NET development has already raised the issue of how to guarantee good markup from programming, a task that has become slightly easier since the release of .NET 2.0.

Developers must first produce accessible, valid Master pages. Rather than out-of-the-box Master pages, this process should start with a minimal template, such as an example made available by Microsoft.

Thereafter the quality of markup output by .NET 2.0 user controls can be improved upon quite significantly using delegate controls or CSS-Friendly Control Adapters.

Unlike many of the widgets and plugins of other, comparable products, MOSS 2007′s own Web Parts are rarely configurable (presumably because of their proprietary nature), which contributes to the issue of accessibility, since these same Web Parts typically spit out execrable markup.

Most such Web Parts exhibit one or more of the following issues:

• HTML tables for layout, or improperly marked up for data
• Obtrusive Javascript that fails to provide alternatives
• Inline styles rather than applying external CSS by class or ID
• Multiple instances of ID attributes instead of unique IDs
• Fixed rather than relative units

Accordingly, it is essential that simple semantic markup is used in order to achieve maximum flexibility and optimal accessibility, otherwise all the hard work done on fine-tuning the Master and other user controls will be compromised.

Conclusion: fit for purpose?

Web-based groupware promises much for the future: information architecture, findability, collaboration and a single point of origin for access, audit and workflow.

The debate on how far Sharepoint achieves the definition is open. At the time of writing (October 2007) the Intranet Benchmarking Forum published a report on the suitability of Sharepoint for an organisation intranet and its findings were mixed, while earlier in the year respected analyst CMSWatch considered MOSS 2007 inappropriate for web publishing scenarios.

Whether or not Sharepoint does the job in a general sense, organisations for whom a high level of accessibility is important (in an ideal world, that would be all organisations) should be concerned about MOSS 2007.

Organisations looking to develop an accessible MOSS 2007 solution for both visitors and administrators will need to make significant investment in development and to accept the probable loss of much of Sharepoint’s richer functionality.

If Microsoft Office integration (or lock-in, depending on the reader’s interpretation) isn’t a key deliverable, then consideration could be given to a content management platform with a lighter footprint that wraps in a high level of accessibility as standard and offers plenty of flexibility at the front-end.