ASP.Net Applications and accessibility!
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Hello folks, I need to work on a client's data driven asp.Net site and make it accessible. The things that immediately came to my mind are making sure all the images have tags specified, and that all the tables have headers elements specified in html. Now these are the things that can be checked pretty quickly...I'm trying to figure out what is the right approach towards accomplishing this compliance with the W3C standards on accessibility. In other words do you guys think that redesigning the site from the scratch would be a better option, or should I just make sure that all the controls that are being used in the site (most of them are data bound controls) would have some property exposed on them which will allow the alternative text behaviour (NOTE: datagrid for instance doesn't support alt tags but has use accessible header property which allows you to specify a header so that the screen reader programs and read it without any issues. Folks, the bottom line is that I'm basically trying to see if anyone of you guys have worked on this sort of stuff before where you are making an existing site (pretty big in size) accessable. I'd appreciate if you share your experience with me. Thanks and happy Thanksgivng to all. sam
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Hello folks, I need to work on a client's data driven asp.Net site and make it accessible. The things that immediately came to my mind are making sure all the images have tags specified, and that all the tables have headers elements specified in html. Now these are the things that can be checked pretty quickly...I'm trying to figure out what is the right approach towards accomplishing this compliance with the W3C standards on accessibility. In other words do you guys think that redesigning the site from the scratch would be a better option, or should I just make sure that all the controls that are being used in the site (most of them are data bound controls) would have some property exposed on them which will allow the alternative text behaviour (NOTE: datagrid for instance doesn't support alt tags but has use accessible header property which allows you to specify a header so that the screen reader programs and read it without any issues. Folks, the bottom line is that I'm basically trying to see if anyone of you guys have worked on this sort of stuff before where you are making an existing site (pretty big in size) accessable. I'd appreciate if you share your experience with me. Thanks and happy Thanksgivng to all. sam
Sam Your problems really kick in if you are using any ASP.NET control that exposes badly formatted HTML. Now, accessibility means different things to different people. For instance, if you want a blind person to be able to use the site then you will find that tables are pretty much useless because they render it almost impossible for screen readers to work with the site. This means that you will need to use CSS, but the ASP.NET controls such as the menu control expose tables don't they? Well, if you are using .NET 2, there is a wonderful little thing that you can do: http://www.asp.net/cssadapters/[^] I hope that this gives you some ideas.
Arthur Dent - "That would explain it. All my life I've had this strange feeling that there's something big and sinister going on in the world." Slartibartfast - "No. That's perfectly normal paranoia. Everybody in the universe gets that." Deja View - the feeling that you've seen this post before.
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Sam Your problems really kick in if you are using any ASP.NET control that exposes badly formatted HTML. Now, accessibility means different things to different people. For instance, if you want a blind person to be able to use the site then you will find that tables are pretty much useless because they render it almost impossible for screen readers to work with the site. This means that you will need to use CSS, but the ASP.NET controls such as the menu control expose tables don't they? Well, if you are using .NET 2, there is a wonderful little thing that you can do: http://www.asp.net/cssadapters/[^] I hope that this gives you some ideas.
Arthur Dent - "That would explain it. All my life I've had this strange feeling that there's something big and sinister going on in the world." Slartibartfast - "No. That's perfectly normal paranoia. Everybody in the universe gets that." Deja View - the feeling that you've seen this post before.
Pete, First of all, I loved the quote at the footer of your post "Deja View - the feeling that you've seen this post before." :) Thanks for the response, you are right that figuring out how these server side controls reneder themselves would definitely be the challange...see I've been a middle tier developer for a few years now and haven't done any front tier development in a while and therefore not very good with all the differnet controls and things of that nature. Oh btw we are using ASP .Net 1.1....so the CSS Friendly Control Adapters that you mentioned in the article are also out of the loop...by the way the article said in the begining "you can modify any ASP.NET control so it produces exactly the HTML you want". This seems like a pretty powerful statement...now in practice though, are they referring to just modifying the HTML from the html view in Visual studio editor to make the particular control do things that you desire...or are they referring to adding properties, events and things like that to the control programatically??? If either one of these statements I made above are true, then that would mean that it doesn't matter what kind of control I'm dealing with, as long as I can modify its built in behavior I should be good. Any other pointers or thoughts that you may have, I'd love to hear them. Thanks for your time. Sam
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Pete, First of all, I loved the quote at the footer of your post "Deja View - the feeling that you've seen this post before." :) Thanks for the response, you are right that figuring out how these server side controls reneder themselves would definitely be the challange...see I've been a middle tier developer for a few years now and haven't done any front tier development in a while and therefore not very good with all the differnet controls and things of that nature. Oh btw we are using ASP .Net 1.1....so the CSS Friendly Control Adapters that you mentioned in the article are also out of the loop...by the way the article said in the begining "you can modify any ASP.NET control so it produces exactly the HTML you want". This seems like a pretty powerful statement...now in practice though, are they referring to just modifying the HTML from the html view in Visual studio editor to make the particular control do things that you desire...or are they referring to adding properties, events and things like that to the control programatically??? If either one of these statements I made above are true, then that would mean that it doesn't matter what kind of control I'm dealing with, as long as I can modify its built in behavior I should be good. Any other pointers or thoughts that you may have, I'd love to hear them. Thanks for your time. Sam
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Pete, First of all, I loved the quote at the footer of your post "Deja View - the feeling that you've seen this post before." :) Thanks for the response, you are right that figuring out how these server side controls reneder themselves would definitely be the challange...see I've been a middle tier developer for a few years now and haven't done any front tier development in a while and therefore not very good with all the differnet controls and things of that nature. Oh btw we are using ASP .Net 1.1....so the CSS Friendly Control Adapters that you mentioned in the article are also out of the loop...by the way the article said in the begining "you can modify any ASP.NET control so it produces exactly the HTML you want". This seems like a pretty powerful statement...now in practice though, are they referring to just modifying the HTML from the html view in Visual studio editor to make the particular control do things that you desire...or are they referring to adding properties, events and things like that to the control programatically??? If either one of these statements I made above are true, then that would mean that it doesn't matter what kind of control I'm dealing with, as long as I can modify its built in behavior I should be good. Any other pointers or thoughts that you may have, I'd love to hear them. Thanks for your time. Sam
Sam We did a lot of work with .NET 1/1.1 to render out accessible web forms. Here are some pointers to get you on your way: If you want XHTML output (not strictly necessary for accessibility, but it is a nice to have), then you are going to have to modify the HTML that is sent back to the browser. This article gives you a taste (the approach we took was different, but that was because we needed to modify other things on the form as well): http://www.liquid-internet.co.uk/content/dynamic/pages/series1article1.aspx[^] One way to guarantee that you produce valid CSS is to "roll your own" controls. This is not as hard as it sounds, and can be good fun. Regards Pete
Arthur Dent - "That would explain it. All my life I've had this strange feeling that there's something big and sinister going on in the world." Slartibartfast - "No. That's perfectly normal paranoia. Everybody in the universe gets that." Deja View - the feeling that you've seen this post before.