SharePoint Tip #27. Do you know “How to make Web Part zone WCAG compliant”?

Michael — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 06:07:49 GMT

SharePoint provides you a nice ASP.NET model of Web Parts functionality. But when we are building the internet faced public sites and trying to apply Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) on Web Part Zones it come back and bite us. The major problem is that Web Part zone is not WCAG compliant.

There are several ways to achieve desired behaviour

use “Accessibility Kit for SharePoint”. It seems to be very logical step to consider :) There are 25(!) different adapters, which have to address accessibility of Web Parts, but harsh reality is that none of them address Web Parts Zones compliance. Yep, it’s not a joke :) So, cross out this point
Use *custom* adapter on the top of WebPartZone to render content with <DIV> tag. Unfortunately SharePoint integrated a lot if JavaScripts to their web parts zones, that current approach breaks drag-n-drop functionality of Web Parts. (I reckon that’s why AKT didn’t address this issue)

In these days using custom adapters is the only way to achieve WCAG for Web Parts Zone. It won’t work for the intranet sites, due to broken drag-n-drop functionality, but for public sites it has not disadvantages, because you usually don’t allow users to change layout of public sites.

You can find custom adapter for the Web Parts zone there. Thanks to eigilm for this code.

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SharePoint Tip #23. Do you know “how to make MOSS sites rendered correctly in IE8”?

Michael — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 03:05:14 GMT

Some Web sites may not be displayed correctly or work correctly in Windows Internet Explorer 8. There is a KB956197 on Mictosoft site, explaining this problem.

This issue affects the MOSS sites to be rendered fine. The good thing of this that it’s very small fix to apply on the master page to have your SharePoint sites rendered correctly – you need to set the IE7 compatibility explicitly.

Just add the following code to the META section of your master.Page

This will force your site to be displayer in IE compatibility mode and it renders without any glitches and nothing stops you to use IE8 for your SharePoint environments.

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SharePoint world of ECM and Information Management : Rendering

SharePoint Tip #27. Do you know “How to make Web Part zone WCAG compliant”?

SharePoint Tip #23. Do you know “how to make MOSS sites rendered correctly in IE8”?