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Re: accessibility of Dot Net Nuke and SharePoint

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From: John E. Brandt
Date: Jun 2, 2007 10:00AM

I did an rather extensive analysis of DNN a year or so ago when I was
running my jebswebs website using DNN, but the DNN application crashed one
day and I lost both the site and the database...so the content and all of my
pity comments were lost.

In any case, what I remember from that time was that much of the "engine"
driving the DNN application is "hidden" away in the Windows server which at
various times was .ASP or .NET . I believe the latest iteration of this is
SharePoint.

When I had DNN installed it was the latest version and was running on a
hosted Windows server, I believe running .NET v 2 which was apparently
quite a bit superior to v 1 in terms of accessibility, as well as in other
regards. But there were still serious problems with accessibility in the DNN
application itself and there appeared to be relatively little interest,
attention, or movement in the DNN development community to bring things into
compliance with accessibility requirements or even web standards. The reason
I say "relatively" is in comparison to the significant amount of interest
I've experienced in the "LAMP world." DNN is open-source, but it appeared
that the people in that community were not as aware or interested in
accessibility issues - my impression.

There was one fellow in Sweden, Tim O'Brien - http://www.obrienit.se who has
developed a completely accessible and standards-based DNN site. But it
required significant tinkering with the development side and advanced
knowledge of ASP. He had an article on the DNN site with play-by-play
instructions on how he did this and it was very complex. He was trying to
convince the "powers that be" to integrate these ideas into the next version
of DNN, but I don't think he was having much success. Part of the problem,
as I recall, had to do with DNN's use of tables and Tim's design which was
completely CSS. Apparently, this would not allow all of the old sites to
migrate to a new version. I did converse with him and I sensed some
frustration.

In the meantime, I discovered Drupal and Joomla! and lots of folks in those
communities who understood accessibility and embraced it. So when my DNN
site crashed, I saw it as a calling from God and dumped DNN, and changed to
a Linux host. It was a good move.

I'm not sure how to advise you on this. If your system is already integrated
in SharePoint, you may be stuck needing to stay with that. You may need to
get Microsoft to advise you as they claim their software complies with
Section 508. And you might want to track down Tim.

~j


John E. Brandt
Augusta, Maine USA
www.jebswebs.com



-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Kathleen Ballard
Sent: Saturday, June 02, 2007 7:26 AM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: [WebAIM] accessibility of Dot Net Nuke and SharePoint

My company is considering Dot Net Nuke (DNN) and SharePoint for use in a
fairly large upcoming project.
Because I am the only developer on the teams involved with any interest in
topic of accessiblity, I have been tasked with collect in information on
developing accessible applications with these 2 products.

The links I have found for DNN are dated 3 or 4 years ago and refer to much
earlier versions (v1 and v2).
Most of the result for SharePoint queries send me back to Microsoft's.

If anyone on the list has some references or experiences they can share, it
would be very helpful.
I hoping to collect positive features, weaknesses that should be addressed
during the design phase and bugs that need to be avoided or rebuilt for both
tools.

I appreciate any advice you can offer,
Kathleen