SharePoint Governance

Web accessibility is becoming more important as businesses are increasingly generating new content. There is lots of good advice and guidelines provided by W3C, Disable Discrimination Act, RNIB, Government etc… that focuses on how to make a website accessible. Good mark-up is the foundation of a usable, accessible and robust website. The HTML and CSS which passes the validation test can be very useful, but this is not the same as accessibility. HTML validators do not check that the ‘ALT’ attributes are relevant, or that link text is useful

Accessibility is very subjective even when using standardized guidelines. I believe organizations should make their documents as accessible as they can, but remain committed to improving the accessibility of any document when and if an issue is brought to their attention. It is very challenging to create content which is accessible to people with different disabilities for e.g. content may be accessible to either the visually impaired or those that are hard of hearing, but may not be accessible to those that are deaf-blind.

I think that it is fair to assume that an accessible web is necessary to provide everyone with the right to freely participate in the cultural life of community, to enjoy and share scientific advancement and its benefits. The web accessibility guidelines are not simply legislative, they are a moral obligation. Looking at a recent example, the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics Comittee, they stated ‘where practical and possible, we added additional options to meet the needs of those with visual impairments’. Despite this attempt many felt that the site was not a significant improvement on previous Olympic sites – sites which have previously been subjects to human-rights injunctions, regarding accessibility, which they have lost.

This shows that there is still a long way to go before content created and published within the public domain is made 100% accessible to everyone. The UK government has a commitment to make all the local government web sites accessible for every citizen by the end of 2010 and this poses a very difficult but essential challenge

We at Vamosa understand the difficulties associated in keeping content in line with W3C guidelines and thus provide solutions that allow organizations to automatically check and fix any breaches should they occur, ensuring content quality is maintained in line with your organizations Accessibility and HTML standards while adehering to Enterprise Content Governance Standards.