Announcing the Accessibility Kit for SharePoint (AKS) 1.0

December 5th, 2007 · No Comments

I’m very pleased to announce that the Accessibility Kit for SharePoint (AKS) 1.0 is now available at http://www.codeplex.com/AKS. The AKS, pre-announced a few months ago, provides templates, master pages, controls, and web parts along with technical documentation that enable designers and developers to advance the accessibility of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 based web sites and applications for people with disabilities, especially those who are vision impaired.

To reiterate the approach that we’re taking with the AKS, it is being developed as a set of building blocks rather than an end-to-end solution. We expect many SharePoint partners to take various pieces of the kit and integrate them into their respective product or service offerings while some customers will integrate particular components of the kit into their SharePoint deployment processes. Furthermore, HiSoftware and Microsoft will jointly establish and nurture a community of SharePoint site designers and developers that’s focused on accessibility advancement and standards compliance. There’s currently a web forum and an e-mail distribution list that you can join.

The 1.0 release was postponed by a few weeks in order for the technical documentation to be finished. We will provide details about the upcoming AKS 1.1 release very soon.

Please take a look at the AKS 1.0 and give us your feedback.