Sharepoint Web Site Accessibility Audit

Challenge: An international law firm with an active intranet in a Sharepoint environment wanted to assure that all of its staff could access, navigate within and contribute to the firm’s communication and success, irrespective of disability or other interface challenge. Further, they wanted to be confident that they could apply the same level of access to their customer and client facing web applications in the future.

Approach: As the firm expanded its internal and external web-based offerings, the opportunity to provide access to a broad global population, including that portion of the population with disabilities, was becoming a more urgent business reality. From everyday “power users” to the casual user interacting with the firm’s website offerings, the firm had expressed an interest in ensuring that their web pages and presence were highly usable and accessible in their design and operation. MPS Partners/nAblement conducted a Section 508 web accessibility audit for a subset of pages from the client’s Sharepoint site as requested by IT management. The Section 508 standards and the W3C (WorldWide Web Consortium) standards were employed to provide the appropriate criteria by which to evaluate the web pages.

Solution: The scope of the evaluation included 68 web pages (68 documents), ten filtered search documents, one document confirming the “ALERT ME” capability for all requested site pages, and an Executive Summary document. All 80 documents were provided in Microsoft WORD format.

This evaluation method was primarily focused on testing accessibility for computer users with disabilities. Accessibility testing was performed using the Windows Eyes screen-reader software, referred to throughout the exhaustive report as the “Reader Tool”. The evaluator, who was blind and a degreed IT developer, used the software to navigate each of the 68 web pages and provide commentary on the usability standards.

Each page was also evaluated using the web-based W3C validation service. This web-based service uses an automated validation process to evaluate web pages for web accessibility, and generates the volume of error and warning messages for each web page, including the raw source code used by the W3C validator at the end of each document.

To reduce the page volume of error and warning messages, the MPS Partners/nAblement team reviewed each of the 68 web page evaluation documents and “weeded out” duplicate messages, causing a reduction in document size by as much as 75%. Ten filtered searches were also performed under supervision, resulting in the production of ten additional documents, which included the contents of the search results.

The Section 508 web accessibility audit process is generally considered to be an iterative process. Pages are revised due to error detection. Websites have pages added, deleted, or modified over time, and occasionally standards evolve into a newer version.