With SharePoint adoption among different organizations raging on, SharePoint is widely used as a comprehensive Enterprise Content Management System (a.k.a. ECM). Some SharePoint users are using SharePoint as their intranet portal while others are using it as public internet portal.
Since information published on SharePoint is consumed by a large number of people, accessibility is becoming one of the challenges we cannot ignore anymore. SharePoint is especially widely adopted by non-profit organizations because of its rich features.
First, let’s take a look at what is web accessibility before we dive into this issue. Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can use the web. More specifically, web accessibility means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the web, as well as they can contribute to the web. Web accessibility also benefits a more general public, like senior citizen with declining abilities due to aging.
Web accessibility also involves quite a lot of topics. And here I am focusing on fonts, more specifically on font size.
What font size is the perfect one? The best answer is also the worst one?it depends. Some people think that the default font size of browsers is too big. Perhaps it is, for some users. For other users it may still be too small. It is impossible to create the perfect font size for all audiences.
Most browsers, though, allow users to enlarge or shrink the font size according to their preferences. The Opera browser even allows the entire document to be enlarged, including images. Users with low vision capacity often alter the settings of their browsers to accommodate their needs. Some users use screen enlargement software.
Believe it or not, SharePoint has not reached compliance with accessibility standards. Take a look at the Accessibility Conformance Statement as a reference:
For SharePoint 2007:
SharePoint 2007 is not standards compliant for accessibility.
For SharePoint 2010:
WCAG 2.0
—-A: SP-Foundation Administration and Configuration
—-AA: All Default Content Pages
To solve this issue, there are quite a lot of ways. For example, get help from some SharePoint consultants who specialize on SharePoint accessibility, use SharePoint third party tools improving SharePoint accessibilities, and so forth.
In this blog, I am going to introduce a tool (a web part) that is designed to improved the accessibility of SharePoint text. This web part, which is called SharePoint Text Size Zoom, is extremely easy to use and actually the product itself is a SharePoint web part with superior accessibility standard.
Quite like its name suggests, SharePoint Text Size Zoom is designed to give SharePoint users control over their SharePoint text display, enabling them to enlarge or decrease SharePoint text size very easily.
Of course, SharePoint users could change text size using browser settings. But for those who do not have required skills or experience, changing SharePoint text size is a challenge. Furthermore, for people having issues with web accessibility, going through such a lengthy process to change the text size can be very challenging. This kind of predicament severely damages the readability of content on SharePoint.
SharePoint Text Size Zoom web part presents three buttons on the SharePoint pages. With these three buttons, users can change text size. Each button is marked with a big A of different size. Clicking one of the buttons, the text size on that page will be changed instantly. The button with a bigger A will increase text size, the button with smaller A decreases text size, and the one with middle-sized A will bring back text size to normal.? All of these operations are very intuitive and there is tool-tip on each button!
Even for administrators, adding SharePoint Text Size Zoom is as easy as it can be. By clicking “Add a Web Part”, there will appear a select box to choose the SharePoint Text Size Zoom web part. The web part will be added to SharePoint pages once the “Add” button is clicked.
Pretty much like the rest of the products from BoostSolutions, SharePoint Text Size Zoom is compatible with SharePoint 2010 and 2007. You can download a 30-day free trial without creating any account. Also, it comes in three languages–English, German and Japanese.