SharePoint branding without accessibility requirements

If a SharePoint site has to be branded but is not required to meet any accessibility standard, the next consideration is whether the proposed branding style is radically different from the default look of SharePoint (or any of its associated built-in styles).

If the branding is exactly the same except for a change of colour, a new site theme should be created or an existing theme should be copied and modified.

If there are small structure and colour changes required to a built-in style for a SharePoint, the built-in SharePoint style should be copied and modified.

If the branding of the proposed SharePoint site is quite different from any of the built-in styles, a new branding will have to be created from scratch.

An example of changes that would qualify as regarding a complete build of master pages would be a custom navigation menu.

General considerations when creating a completely new branding for SharePoint

If the design of the site is going to be radically different from built-in SharePoint sites, the best practice is to create static web pages of the site design. This is the case for both accessible and non-accessible site designs.

The static pages should work well across a variety of browsers and pass accessibility testing if this is a requirement for the final SharePoint branding. This task of creating the static web pages could be done by an external party such as a web design agency. There are guidelines that should be followed when creating static pages for a branding for SharePoint that are outside the scope of this document.

Once these static pages have been created, these static pages will need to be cut up into separate ASP.NET files that SharePoint will use as the layout. This is a developer task.

Custom development of code and website files are also required when creating a new SharePoint branding.

Sites with accessibility requirements will require a lot more coding than those without. The development required really depends on the requirements of the site content.

SharePoint Designer

SharePoint designer is a free programme from Microsoft that can be used to customize the appearance of SharePoint whether it is WSS only or MOSS. Although some parts of the designer may be useful such as the workflow wizard, it is not suitable for any significant branding of SharePoint.

Accessibility standards overview

Website accessibility standards are specified by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) which is a sub group of the W3C. The most common accessibility level to aim for is Double-A.

The main goals to achieve Double-A conformance is to produce clean HTML where the layout is controlled by CSS.

Aside from producing reasonably clean HTML, other considerations for accessible sites include providing:

• alternate text for images
• alternate content for media such as flash or navigation that depends on JavaScript
• meaningful titles for links on the page

Some of the standards for accessibility are the responsibility of the content editor such as providing alternate means of accessing content.

There are programs such as Total Validator which can automatically validate a web page against an accessibility level.

Considerations when branding MOSS SharePoint sites

With MOSS 2007 the following can be achieved:

• Colour scheme changes
• Major layout and appearance changes, making the site unrecognisable as a SharePoint
• Sites that conform to accessibility guidelines (though not without considerable effort)

The first consideration when branding a MOSS sites is whether the site has to conform to accessibility guidelines.

By default, SharePoint does not come close to conforming to accessibility guidelines but it can be re-worked with a variety of techniques to produce accessible content with (at least) 3 caveats.

These caveats are:

• Accessibility can only be achieved when a user is accessing a site in a read-only style mode
• Many advanced features of SharePoint cannot be used. These include:
  • Almost all web parts
  • Web part zones (a type of layout that allows flexibility in placement of modules)
  • Built-in brandings and themes that come with SharePoint
  • The default content editor
• It takes lots of work! Custom development is almost certainly required.

The NSU Safe network site is an example of a SharePoint site that conforms to Double-A compliancy.

There are 2 notable frameworks that have been created to assist with making SharePoint accessible.

The Accessibility Kit for SharePoint (AKS)

There is an accessibility framework produced by a HiSoft in association with Microsoft. The framework is currently at version 2.0 at this time.

The kit includes more accessible versions of the built-in SharePoint themes and layouts though using any of these is a token gesture towards accessibility.

From investigation, a lot of development is still required to create an accessible site and the AKS does not provide much help towards this.

The Alternative Rendering Framework (ARF)

ARF is an open source framework to assist with creating accessible SharePoint sites. One of the core concepts of the framework is to keep using SharePoint lists and document libraries as the data store for a site but providing an alternative method for customizing the display of this data.

The ARF has proved very useful for creating accessible sites is used in the NSU Safe Network site.

This article is only relevant for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007.

When there is a requirement to customise the appearance of a SharePoint site, the first consideration is the version being used.

Branding WSS sites

If the SharePoint version is WSS (free to install if you have Windows Server 2003), colour and image changes are possible along with minor layout changes. It is not possible to use WSS to produce an accessible SharePoint site.

The default theme of SharePoint looks like the following

Other built-in themes that have different colours and images only are available

Microsoft released 10 new themes for SharePoint in March 2009 and one of these could be used. Again, the structure of the site is the same and only colour and images have changed.

One of the big claims in the WCM space for SPS 2010 was it’s conformance out-of-the-box with the WCAG version2 standard to the AA level.

It’s only at Beta release at the minute and it’s subject to change but early indications look like this:

(NB: i have used a couple of common Accessibility Audit tools and am looking specifically for WCAG AA errors. NNB: While these tools are useful from an Audit perspective, there is no satisfactory measure of accessibility other than a proper evaluation with disabled users).

Also testing with client-side scripting (JavaScript) disabled as there needs to be an acceptable level of functionality without relying on this.

Team Site Template – Home Page

Total Validator (www.totalvalidator.com): Total errors found: 524 (Parsing: 7, HTML: 467, WCAG v2 A: 49, WCAG v2 AA: 1)

WAVE (http://wave.webaim.org/): WAVE has detected 12 accessibility errors

Disable JavaScript: Site Actions button doesn’t display a menu, none of the Ribbon controls work, ‘My Profile’ button doesn’t work, Search doesn’t work, Tags / Like It doesn’t work

Team Site Template – Document Library (Ribbon View)

Total Validator: Total errors found: 449 (Parsing: 12, HTML: 413, WCAG v2 A: 23, WCAG v2 AA: 1)

WAVE: WAVE has detected 13 accessibility errors

Disable JavaScript: Site Actions button doesn’t display a menu, none of the Ribbon controls work, document context menu doesn’t work, Search doesn’t work, Tags / Like It doesn’t work

Publishing Site Template – Home Page

Total Validator: Total errors found: 210 (Parsing: 3, HTML: 193, WCAG v2 A: 14)

WAVE: WAVE has detected 3 accessibility errors

Disable JavaScript: Site Actions button doesn’t display a menu, Help button doesn’t work, Search doesn’t work, Search field pre-populated with text.

Summary:

These figures are not totally accurate as several of the ‘errors’ flagged by these tools can be safely ignored, but we can see that things may not be as clear cut as stating that SharePoint 2010 has out of the box compliance with WCAGv2.