designer

418 Chapter 12 Understanding Usability and Accessibility
Tip The hyperlinks do not have to be broken for you to use the Hyperlinks task pane to
replace hyperlinks. This can be a very useful method of completing a global change of
one URL address with another.
CLEAN UP Close the Hyperlinks task pane. Close Index.aspx, and leave SharePoint
Designer open if you are continuing to the next exercise.
Understanding Accessibility Legislation and Testing
Most of the world’s countries have accessibility legislation, which you need to meet
if you publish public Web sites and/or internal Web sites, especially for government
departments and educational institutions. Two examples of such legislation are the
U.K.’s Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) 1995 and Section 508 of the United State’s
Rehabilitation Act.
In many situations, should a court case take place, the level of conformance to relevant
accessibility guidelines will be taken into consideration. Two of the most prominent
guideline documents are the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) from
the W3C (now version 2.0) and the U.S. government’s Section 508, Voluntary Product
Accessibility Templates (VPATs).
Microsoft is active in producing VPATs to show how its software products meet key regulations
of Section 508 and also encourages harmonization of Section 508 with WCAG
2.0. Microsoft joins the European Commission in the view that only common accessibility
standards will ensure compatibility and interoperability of technologies.
Most importantly, SharePoint 2010 now has a prime focus on meeting European guidelines
and makes it far easier than previous versions of SharePoint for you to meet WCAG
version 2.0 A, AA, and even AAA guidelines. The improvements in SharePoint 2010
include:
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A W3C XHTML reference.
Use of tags for page construction rather than tables.
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Correct heading hierarchy—that is, H1, H2, H3.
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The UseSimpleRendering property for the control, which is
used in SharePoint to dynamically create the navigational elements on a page, such
as the top navigation tabs. When UseSimpleRendering is set to True, the SharePoint
navigation menu is rendered in the browser using a cleaner, unordered XHTML list.