AKS 2.0 arrives on March 09

Good news travel fast here is some information from the press release:

“…

AKS v2.0 is intended to reduce the level of effort and knowledge needed by customers and partners to improve the accessibility of SharePoint-based sites/applications. The new AKS v2.0 components include:

• Smart Control adapters which greatly reduce the amount of custom configuration previously required for AKS control adapters;
• The Web Part Zone Control Adapter which is a special Smart Adapter that modifies the output of SharePoint so that it does not use tables for layout of the Web parts;
• HiSoftware’s Compliant Code Engine (HCCE) which can be used to assist organizations in creating code that is compliant to standards-based HTML or XHTML;
• Additional requirements under Canadian Common Look and Feel 2.0 (CLF 2.0) guidelines;
• Examples of remediation to comply with WCAG 2.0 Level AA;
• French language version of AKS v1.0 components

…”

There is also a new RTF text editor, which is accesible,  but with a payed licensing:

Overview of aRTE functions and features:

• Accessible input
• Capable of creating accessible output
• Capable of creating XHTML compliant output
• Cross-browser alternative to the default rich-text editor in MOSS and WSS
• Multi-lingual capabilities  
• Tool Bar and Context Menus
• Cut, Copy and Paste from Microsoft Word
• Integrated Spell Checking
• Character formatting
• Paragraph formatting
• HTML source editing

…

 

 

Finally, Compliance Sheriff for MOSS provides an audit monitoring capability, enabling users to scan and review content in the MOSS environment for continuous risk management and reporting. This full lifecycle approach empowers designers and content authors to build and create compliant content from the ground up. It also provides the added benefit of back-end fail safe testing and monitoring to help mitigate risk of inaccessible or non-compliant content from entering into the live environment.

..

Full info and downloads from https://aks.hisoftware.com.

CAPTCHAS and Accessibility

Several solutions came upon to solve this problem by adding an alternative render mode in audio format. Personally the output is very difficult to understand, specially if you are not an native english speaker.
One possible alternative is based on the concept of negative captcha. This concept states that instead of prooving you a re a human by processing some sort of information, it only is visible to bots. It is the idea of a honney pot applied to human proofing process.

I find this concept to be quite neat due to its simplicity, although I have some doubts regarding its results. Guided by those doubts, I have evolved the solution devoloped in the subkimet project, added some sparkling in order to raise the difficulty level. I think you should do too, but keep them to yourself!

<IMHO>
Think of it as the lock to the door of your home. There are a lot of techy guys willing to share the base information (the code at codeplex will be the lock itself with a vergin key). Now you must craft the key yourself and keep it safe. You don’t give the key to your home to everyone, right?
</IMHO>

BTW: this is not Sharepoint domain. This is valid for any web solution.

Available controls with code:
http://www.codeplex.com/subkismet/

Some links discussing the topic:
Negative CAPTCHA: http://damienkatz.net/2007/01/negative_captch.html
Stopping spambots with hashes and honeypots (Great!): http://nedbatchelder.com/text/stopbots.html

New paper on Moss and Accessibility

A couple of weeks ago, a paper came out with guidance on how to develop accessible sites on MOSS/WSS. This is a good guide on a hot topic. If you ever tried developing accessible sites in Sharepoint, you know what I’m talking about, expecially if you go “AA” and above.

So you can find the paper on technet.

“…

This downloadable white paper provides information and best practices for organizations delivering accessible Web solutions built on the MOSS Platform. The white paper was written as a collaboration with Microsoft and RNIB.  …”

If you haven’t done so, check AKS (Accessibility Kit for Sharepoint) from hisoftware. Its a very useful set of tools that will help you create accessible sites.

 

Cheers.