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Re: Newbie .Net question

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From: John E. Brandt
Date: Oct 14, 2008 9:40AM

Good luck.

First, I am not a programmer or development expert - and I don't play one on
TV (A little Culver City levity).

It has been awhile since I played in that world. What I remember...I used
DotNetNuke (DNN) which - at the time - was one of the few (only?) open
source solutions for .NET and it was very quirky and not very accessible out
of the box. It was my first foray into CMSs - and it was quite a learning
experience. Some of the problems stemmed from the .NET infrastructure, some
were core coding issues peculiar to DNN. I was playing with it during the
transition from .NET1 to .NET2. Version 2, as I recall, was better than v1,
but not perfect. I also recall that to make my site meet minimal web
accessibility standards I had to strip it down to bare bones. The biggest
issues were with the back end as DNN had integrated lots of AJAX control
that were not accessible. I was able to create a site that the outside
public could access, but I doubt a person with a screen reader would be able
to administer or even create an account and add content.

I am sure it is possible to build an accessible web site in ASP;
retrofitting one might be a challenge. It is not clear from your question is
the site currently IS accessible or whether you need to make it accessible.
If it is the later, it could be quite a challenge.

It will be interesting to see who else responds to your query. My experience
at the time was that - unlike the folks in the LAMP development world -
people in the DNN/.NET development community were not very knowledgeable (or
interested?) in accessibility issues. There was one guy in Sweden who seemed
to be interested and he and I corresponded a bit, but we were kind of
lonely.

I applaud your interest and desire to break into this field...but it may not
be wise to be billing the client for your learning time. You may want to
learn about accessible web design first and then take on some clients. I
think if you can learn this stuff quickly and develop skills in building
accessible .NET sites, you would be quite marketable.

Again best of luck.

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