Accessibility / Section 508 with ASP.NET

I have found the following items are important accessibility issues/settings from a development standpoint when building an ASP.NET application:

  • Gridview.
    • UseAccessibleHeader property.  This property causes the output of the gridview to have a <th> as opposed to a <td> for the header.  I am not sure if it does anything else. 
    • Summary attribute.  The Summary attribute does not currently exist on the gridview as any type of property that I have been able to find.  This can be added through the Control.Attribute.Add() method.
  • Label.
    • AssociatedControlId property.  This property causes the server side control to output the “For” attribute and to output the value as the client side Id of the server side associated control. 
  • Images or other non-tech element.
    • Alt attribute.  Client side images need to have some type of “Alt” attribute that can be set client side.
    • LongDesc attribute.  I don’t use the longdesc attribute, however, I have read about it in various documents
  • Manually created table.
    • I don’t use manually create tables much in ASP.NET.  I did in Classic ASP, but didn’t everyone.  In a table with X rows and Y columns, column data falls under the headers.  There are situations where that type of layout doesn’t work and there may be a need to associate two columns of the table with the same header information.

Why is this of interest to me?  I feel that it is good to provide support to users of screen readers.  I have never seen anything as exciting as a user being able to access an application when they have been so frustrated in the past.

 

Original post: http://morewally.com/cs/blogs/wallym/archive/2006/10/03/389.aspx 

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