Presenting at SharePoint Saturday DC

I am presenting at SharePoint Saturday DC on December 5th (http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/dc/default.aspx).

My presentation is on building custom, “accessible” SharePoint sites.

Most of the projects I work on in SharePoint are custom websites built on top of the SharePoint framework. I constantly hear “can you make this site not look like SharePoint”. Most SharePoint developers, architects and designers know the tricks to do this now a days.

Also, the start of my career was in government services. However, the last 5 years have been on the commercial side. It was in the commercial world that I primarily worked with SharePoint. I am now back in the government world again and 508 accessibility is a common requirement. I learned about 508 accessibility when I started my career in government and now I am trying to mesh my SharePoint knowledge with my accessibility knowledge.

This presentation is my attempt to show tricks and tips to make a SharePoint site accessible. This presentation focuses on building “custom” SharePoint sites because I am showing proper custom master pages, page layouts, control adapters, web part zone customizations, etc… I am not concentrating on out-of-the-box SharePoint Intranets, but a lot of the techniques will work either way. The intent of this presentation is to not only show 508 accessibility tricks, but to also show web standard and css tricks that lead to a more accessible/cross-browser websites.

I look forward to this presentation now that this is one of my passion areas that most people don’t concentrate on in SharePoint. However, everyone should think accessibility when using SharePoint as a framework to build custom websites, regardless if you are in the government or not.