posted on Tuesday, June 15, 2004 4:01 PM
by
Benjy
Accessible ASP.NET Websites
I just came across this article by Scott Mitchell on the ASPNET Developer Centre (MSDN).
The blurb says "Take advantage of inheritance in the .NET Framework to extend ASP.NET classes to make them generate ASP.NET code that is fully accessible to people with disabilities"
Sounds good, but I'm still working through it so I will reserve my comments till I get the whole picture. In the meanwhile I've asked our resident accessibility and web design guru to examine it for use in my current project
I'm happy to see this, and I'd like to wait and watch to see how many people take good advice and exploit the features in the technology to author accessible sites.
Of course, if the claim were that acessibility was baked into the product, (and no one is claiming this) then I would be extremely doubtful and for a good reason. MS doesnt have a good name when it comes to standards compliance. Look at the rubbish they implement in Office HTML (not the round-tripping stuff, thats there for a good reason) and of course FrontPage. Here's a great article about their lack of support for standards in-spite of the noises emanating from Redmond that would seem to suggest otherwise.
Don't get me wrong. I'm happy that they seem to be moving in the right direction and I'm sure they have the talent in their teams to do more and faster. How far will it go?