AKS 2.0 & aRTE Release Dates Announced

by Andy on March 4th, 2009

The General Availability for public download is as follows:

• AKS 2.0: Monday, March 9, 2009
• HiSoftware aRTE for SharePoint v1.0: Tuesday, March 17, 2009

The pending releases will be distributed through the new and improved AKS Community Portal at https://aks.hisoftware.com

Read more on the AKS blog article - http://tinyurl.com/dhw8p3

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VPATs for Microsoft products

by Andy on November 7th, 2008

A Voluntary Product Accessibility Template, or VPAT, is a standardised form developed by the Information Technology Industry Council to show how a software product meets key regulations of Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act.

VPAT documents describe how the accessibility features of Microsoft products help federal agencies address the requirements of Section 508 Standards (and also for us guys in the UK!)

Here’s the link to a comprehensive menu of VPAT’s for Microsoft products, including Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
http://www.microsoft.com/industry/government/products/section508.mspx

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Using Google Chrome with SharePoint 2007

by Andy on September 2nd, 2008

It’s release day of Google Chrome BETA for windows (http://www.google.com/chrome - Tuesday 02^nd September 2008), so, as a proper SharePoint addict you’re gagging to know if Google Chrome works with MOSS/WSS 3.0 right? Ok maybe it’s just me!

I’ve been using Chrome now for about 30 minutes and went straight to work testing it against SharePoint 2007 & WSS 3.0. I’ve been testing the user experience using my current client’s corporate MOSS deployment and my own private WSS 3.0 site.

So far there seems to be few differences in the rendering of the pages adn i’m pleased to find that using ‘more accessible mode’ seems to work the same as it does in IE 7 & FireFox 3.

Here are my findings so far:

- ‘My Links’ down arrow icon does not display where it should.

- ‘Upload Multiple Documents’ is missing from the ‘Upload’ option within a Document Library.

- ‘Connect to client’ is the option for ‘Connect to Outlook’ in Chrome.

- ‘Edit in Datasheet’ and ‘Open with Windows Explorer’ are missing from the ‘Actions’ option within a Document Library.

- On a page that IE would normally provide a ‘This page contains both secure and nonsecure items. Do you want to display the nonsecure items?’ security prompt, I do not receive the same prompt in Chrome (I’m using the default settings in Chrome).

- Things get very interesting in Chrome when you place a page into Design mode; try ‘edit’ on a web part you’ll probably find that the web part options don’t appear where you’d expect them to. Also, web part ‘edit’ choices that show as greyed out in IE don’t even show in Chrome.

- The ‘Content Editor’ web part in IE gives you the option to launch the ‘Rich Text Editor’ and the ‘Source Editor’, but in Chrome the ‘Rich Text Editor’ is not even an option on display and as for the ‘Soure Editor’, well this renders as a small text frame within the Web Part modify settings rather than as an option to launch a new window to make edits!

I’m sure I’m going to find many more issues using SharePoint with Google Chrome, but I have to take into account that this is the first Beta release.

If you’re conducting more extensive testing of accessing SharePoint 2007/WSS 3.0 using Google Chrome BETA for windows and notice other issues, then please do add your comments to this blog post.

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ACCESSIBILITY – Making MOSS Accessible

by Andy on May 14th, 2008

During the past few months I’ve been working with my current client to identify the best methods for making MOSS more accessible for visually impaired end users. This has presented many challenges with screen reading technology (my client currently uses JAWS  and Dolphin’s SuperNova).

I have been using HiSoftware’s AKS (Accessibility Kit for SharePoint) version 1.1. for the past few weeks and as such took the opportunity to meet AKS at the ‘Building Accessible Web Sites Using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and the Accessibility Kit for SharePoint’ session (hosted by HiSoftware and Microsoft) last April at Microsoft’s London Victoria offices.

As I haven’t had time to intensely study the kit (yet) I learnt from the session that rather than using the AKS templates (which are basically rewritten [bland] SharePoint CSS master pages), I should be looking at extracting code snips from the master pages and incorporating them into my own customised master page…….expect more blogging on this when I’ve arrived at this item within my MS Project Plan.

In the meantime the Slidedeck for Accessibility Kit for SharePoint, used at SPC2008, can be found on the Microsoft SharePoint blog here

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