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