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Re: SharePoint frustrations

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From: Moore,Michael (Accessibility) (HHSC)
Date: Nov 23, 2015 9:37AM

I think that SharePoint is the classic example of why you don't do accessibility as a separate process at the end of application development.

SharePoint functional development appears to remain completely divorced from the accessibility add-on that requires turning on "more accessible mode." If Microsoft ever gets serious about the accessibility of their web apps they will probably need to engineer the front end interface from the ground up using a consolidated development team where all of the designers and developers are trained in accessibility. As it is now, it appears that they develop/evolve the front-end and then throw it over the wall to a few developers who labor in an accessibility gulag and must attempt to add the accessibility to the existing application. They are apparently forbidden to alter any of the underlying code that is the source of most of the problems.

An entire cottage industry has evolved to bolt accessibility on to SharePoint. I am sure that there are sound business strategy decisions made by Microsoft to perpetuate this model, and that their shareholders are happy. With their dominance in the enterprise market they really don't have much motivation to change. </rant>

Mike Moore
Accessibility Coordinator
Texas Health and Human Services Commission
Civil Rights Office
(512) 438-3431 (Office)

-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Sent: Saturday, November 21, 2015 7:31 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Sharepoint frustrations

I have seen these issues, and they are due to the fact that accessibility of Sharepoint generated content is beyond horid!
Microsoft didn't just drop the ball on accessibility of Sharepoint generated content, they dug a 100-foot deep hole first.
This has something to do with the misuse of the application role I think. Then aria-hidden is used incorrectly which hides big portions of the content.
It has been a few months, and I will have to dig through my notes to be more specific.
I will try to email you something off-list, if there is still use for this information.
Cheers
-B


On 11/19/15, Ritz, Courtney L. (GSFC-7500) < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> Apologies if I sent this twice, was having an Outlook issue.
>
> Is there anyone on the list who's had experience developing in
> Sharepoint
> 2010 or 2013, and or using it with a screen reader like JAWS?
> I'm at my wit's end, trying to help our developers figure out why JAWS
> keeps treating some of the page content as editable, speaking "edit
> has pop-up" on each line of text or hyperlink and trying to turn on Forms Mode.
> If anyone has any ideas as to what might cause this aggravating
> behavior and what the developers could maybe do to fix it, please let
> me know off-list, unless others here are interested in finding out.
> Unfortunately, for security reasons, the pages are behind a firewall.
> The folks at Microsoft and Freedom Scientific both couldn't help us
> much, since they couldn't see the Sharepoint pages themselves.
>
> Courtney
> > > archives at http://webaim.org/discussion/archives
> >


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