HiSoftware Inc., a leading provider of Microsoft SharePoint products compliance and accessibility solutions and a Microsoft ISV partner, today announced the company will introduce and demonstrate the HiSoftware Accessibility Kit for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 (AKS 2010) during the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009, October 18-22, 2009 in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. The new version of the widely downloaded Microsoft public license solution will allow organizations developing a customized SharePoint Server 2010 platform to provide the highest levels of accessibility to meet the rapidly changing global regulatory guidelines.
Thomas Logan, Vice President of Product Solutions for HiSoftware, said, “With over 7,500 downloads of the current AKS version for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, HiSoftware is pleased to continue to provide the SharePoint community with a solution to assist with meeting their platform accessibility requirements. Based upon the newly released WCAG 2.0 accessibility guidelines, AKS 2010 will leverage the significant improvements in accessibility by providing organizations with the ability to select Web-parts and Adapters that can easily work in a customized environment.”
Logan continued, “In addition, developers will be able to test their entire SharePoint Server 2010 environment against the latest accessibility standards through an integrated commercial offering of HiSoftware’s new AKS 2010 AccValidator™ module. By incorporating HiSoftware Compliance Sheriff for SharePoint 2010, an organization can add the ability to monitor and test content for accessibility and other regulatory issues for an end-to-end enterprise compliance solution.”
AKS 2010 significantly reduces the level of effort and knowledge needed by customers and partners to improve the accessibility of the new SharePoint 2010 platform.
Key features to be included in AKS 2010:
- Re-architected to access content using Document Object Model
- Support for new WCAG 2.0 guidelines and ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) specification
- Easily extensible to provide accessibility fixes for third party controls and customized out of the box controls
- Improved feature deployment
- Updated set of default templates including additional site design, color, and font options
- Improved developer documentation
- Optional integration to HiSoftware Compliance Sheriff to provide additional functionality including:
- Ability to flag warning/fail for templates that do not have accessible contrast ratios
- Allows for easier AKS 2010 implementation into customized sites, enabling users to set-up an initial site(s) scan which will generate a report indicating which part(s) of the AKS 2010 kit to apply. This integration improves efficiency, adding only the control adapters relevant to a particular site configuration.
HiSoftware successfully launched the Accessibility Kit for SharePoint (AKS) v1.0 in early 2008, along with a Web-based partner and customer community (https://aks.hisoftware.com). More than 7,500 organizations from fifty countries have downloaded AKS v1 and v2 which are available under the Microsoft Public License (Open Source seehttp://www.microsoft.com/opensource/licenses.mspx). AKS is intended to be a community based project to which other organizations can contribute.
HiSoftware will be at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 exhibit hall in booth 708. The company will also hold a series of limited-seating Roundtable events and executive briefing sessions during the conference.
