CRM, Accessibility, and 508

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I’ve spent many a time having accessibility and 508 compliance discussions with customers and partners over the years working at Microsoft and focusing on various web based technologies.  In fact, it’s hard to believe I recorded this video over seven years ago:

https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/keydet/Creating-an-Accessible-Web-Page

As it relates to Dynamics CRM 2011, whether your overall implementation is accessible is a combination of:

  1. Whether the HTML the CRM product produces is accessible
  2. Whether your web resources are accessible
  3. Whether any custom ASP.NET, etc. pages integrated into the CRM UI (say through iFrames) are accessible

For #1, the CRM product team produces a document called a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT).  Ben does a good job explaining the relationship to 508 compliance and VPATs here so I won’t go into it.  As Ben mentions, all of Microsoft’s VPATs are available at:

http://www.microsoft.com/government/en-us/products/section508/Pages/default.aspx

The most recent VPAT for Dynamics CRM 2011 (as of writing this) is: Microsoft Dynamics CRM December 2012 Service Update VPAT.  For #2, the CRM 2011 SDK has a section called Create Accessible Web Resources to help you.  This section is chock full of resources and links to external resources on accessibility.  What surprised me is that it doesn’t talk about Visual Studio’s built in accessibility checker which is covered in Visual Studio’s Accessibility in Visual Studio and ASP.NET documentation.  For #3, you need to similarly understand how to make sure those pages are accessible.  Visual Studio’s ASP.NET Controls and Accessibility should prove helpful.  In fact, the 7+ year old video I recorded that I link to earlier shows both the accessibility checker and general ASP.NET accessibility techniques in action.  Hopefully this post is helpful to those of you who are going to be in the business of ensuring your CRM implementation is accessible.  Here are a few other resources you will want to review which are not linked from the other resources in this post as far as I can tell:

http://webaim.org/

http://www.section508.gov/

Now that the latest CRM Online update is complete and UR12 is out, Dynamics CRM 2011 is now cross browser capable.  Therefore, you can now use the popular WAVE Toolbar Firefox addon to check accessibility of your customizations.  Yea, I know, a Microsoft guy recommending Firefox.  I don’t know of a better free tool that allows you to check accessibility of web pages without uploading html or point the tools servers at your web site.  The latter kind of validator won’t work for CRM deployments because of authentication.  Plus, you should be testing all your customizations in Firefox and Chrome anyway.

@devkeydet

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