25.4. Conforming to Web Standards
While designing Web sites, you have to always keep the audience in mind. In a general case, if you're developing for a wider audience, you have to keep in mind that your Web site is accessible with the same fidelity for different desktops, screen resolutions, and browsers and provides functionality to support devices and software meant for users with disabilities. SharePoint Designer provides you with ways to determine whether a Web site or Web page that you create adheres to the standards developed for accessibility.
25.4.1. Understanding accessibility standards
SharePoint Designer allows you to check whether content of your Web site conforms to the following standards for the accessibility of content on the Web:
WCAG Priority 1: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is a set of guidelines determining the accessibility of Web content. It's suggested that the Priority 1 guidelines must be met in order for the Web content to appear on a Web site, and if ignored, the content would not be accessible to a set of users and groups.
WCAG Priority 2: The WCAG 2.0 draft lists a set of accessibility requirements that should be met by Web content creators and if ignored would make it difficult for users to access the site.
Access Board Section 508: This is the U.S. government standard for accessibility. All U.S. government bodies adhere to this standard to determine if a service or content section is technically compliant.
The general idea for these standards for Internet-based content is to ensure that software that provides assistance to people with disabilities can access/read the content clearly.
25.4.2. Using the Accessibility Checker
You use the Accessibility Checker, as shown in Figure 25.5, to provision settings for checking the accessibility of a Web site. Follow these steps:
Choose All Pages to run the check on all Web content inside the Web site. If you have any Web pages open or chosen, the option to run the check on open or chosen content is also available.
By default, all the standards are enabled. If you want to disable checking for one of these, just deselect the corresponding check box.
Specify whether you want to see errors or warnings or if you want to perform manual checking of the standards.
Click OK.
The Accessibility task pane opens, listing errors, warnings, etc., related to the content of the Web site. You can use this pane to perform actions on the resulting rows of Web pages and content that don't adhere to the accessibility standard you chose. The warnings in this case are generally recommendations that SharePoint Designer makes if it encounters an implementation that can be improved to match the standard completely.
Figure 25.5. The Accessibility Checker in SharePoint Designer
25.4.3. Working in the Accessibility task pane
The Accessibility task pane provides you with the location on the Web pages where SharePoint Designer finds a problem matching with the selected accessibility standard. As shown in Figure 25.6, the table shows the page and the line number on the page where the issue exists and also mentions the nature of the problem in the Problem Summary column. You can filter or arrange this report by dropping the column headers in the task pane.
Figure 25.6. The report for a site in the Accessibility task pane
If you right-click on an issue depicted in the report, a popup menu appears, offering the following options:
Go to Page: Opens the page where the issue has been detected
Accessibility Report: Opens the Accessibility Checker to run the report again
Problem Details: Displays a description box with the details of the issue discovered
Learn More: Opens the W3C recommendation Web site and directs to the location associated with the suggestions
Select Resulting Files in Folder List: Chooses the files in the Folder List to perform additional operations on
Clear Results: Clears the Accessibility task pane
Refresh Changed Results: Refreshes the results for changes made to the Web site since the last check was run
Copy Results: Allows you to copy results to the Clipboard
The taskbar in the left corner of the task pane has a Generate HTML Reports button that allows you to create an HTML checklist of the issues found, which you can save or print out and use for tracking the changes and fixes made to the Web site based on the report.