MCMS and Accessibility
We've been looking at Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 for the past 4-5 months, and have completed a pilot project for a Local Authority in Ireland.MCMS is a great product in many ways:
- It's integration with Visual Studio
- It's integration with SharePoint (both for searching and document publishing)
- The separation of developers from authors
But 1 major area in which MCMS falls down, is with generating Accessible websites. Yep sure it's easy to generate a template that is accessible, but making sure the content that the template generates is accessible is a totally different ball game. Because local legislation with regard to Government based websites dictates that all such websites should produce accessible HTML, this was of great concern for us at the time.
Since then however, we are well down the road on the way to generating accessible websites with MCMS. Areas where MCMS falls down with accessibility are:
- Out of the box user controls for navigation, breadcrumbs, etc
- Out of the box HTML and Image placeholders
- MetaData
- Visual Studio "isms" (as I call them, with regard to HTML tag modificaiton when switching to design view)
We did the following to overcome some of these issues:
- Developed our own Navigation and Breadcrumb user controls, that generated "bog standard" HTML using the CMS Publishing API
- Developed custom HTML and Image placeholders, that did find a replaces for certain HTML tags, made sure images had alt text, made sure table columns had descriptions, etc. A Microsoft constultant in the UK was responsible for this, and it works fine. We did look at the MSIB plus pack that has been developed by cScape and IOKO and is “FREE”, but felt that we had more control over the custom one, that's not to say we could change our minds in the future
- Developed custom MetaData placeholder
- Had to use workarounds, in that you don't swtch to design view on template development. This should be fixed by MS. We also used a HTTP Module that parsed the page for tags that we knew could have been modified and changed them to lower case, and changed BR tags to /BR tags.
There is very little documentation about this on the web, and had to work very closely with Microsoft to find a resolution for many of these issues (which they were very helpful about).
If anyone has any questions around our approach, just post a comment!
5 Comments:
A software patch for Visual Studio is supposed to be available, which will fix the HTML tag modifications when switching to and from Design View.
Hi Graham
The +Pack Source is now available
MCMS:Rapid provides accessible sites out of the box.
regards
Mark
Graham, where can I find that software patch? I know they removed that 'feature' from Visual Studio 2005, but since it probably won't be released until Q4-05 of Q1-06, I would like to get that patch, because current behaviour is VERY annoying!
The following was the hotfix that local Microsoft Support suggested would work - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/819945/EN-US/
But this is now included in .Net framework 1.1 SP1, originally they sent me just the hotfix as SP1 wasn't available.
Unfortunately, I still see reoccurences of the same annoying behaviour (but not as often), looks like we'll both have to await Visual Studio 2005.
What I ended up doing was inheriting some code written by an MS consultant, which within a CMS template, on save, uses a HTTP module to strip and replace common accessibility issues (like upper case tags, no closing tags, etc...)
Hello Graham can I have the sample code to replace the capital lettered tags that are generated in the MCMS HTML placeholder to be replaced with small Letters.
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