• What is it?
• Accessibility
• XML and XSLT
• Features
• Prototyping

Why accessible websites

Accessibility is becoming essential as disability laws and guidelines are forcing public websites to be available to all. Most public and private organisation are now required to make their site at least AA compliant, which can be challenging when creating a SharePoint publishing site.

SharePoint publishing sites provide some great functionality for authors and developers alike, but it can fall short when trying to make the site truly AA compliant. This is where ARF can help.

How ARF helps with Accessible MOSS publishing sites

By making use of XML and XSLT, ARF separates the presentation of information from the logic of retrieving the information. This way ARF produces no HTML when building a page. All HTML produced is either via XSLT or standard ASP.Net template controls. This allows the developer to create a page which exactly replicates the HTML produced by the original page designer.

But simply allowing the developer to output valid AA or XHTML compliant content is not the end of the story, some SharePoint controls still insist of producing their own invalid HTML. ARF can help here too.

By providing mechanisms to 'clean' the HTML, ARF allows you to use controls which otherwise produce invalid HTML. The choice is of course yours as to where and when this is done, if at all.

XHTML and AA compliance

By using the techniques shown in the ARF sample site it is easy to create valid AA and XHTML publishing sites. The sample is completely AA compliant and shows a number of techniques to tidy the HTML produced by SharePoint.

Of course there is only so much you can do with your development, as ultimately the authors will also be creating HTML. ARF can help here too, by ensuring that the authored HTML is valid XHTML.