In the whole history of Telerik’s RadControls we have been trying to make them usable for everyone by providing features like Localization, Keyboard Support, Right-to-left Support, WAI-ARIA Support and Accessibility. Now with the Q1 2013 Beta release we are continuing that trend by providing better Accessibility support and meeting WCAG 2.0 and Section 508 Accessibility Compliance guidelines. In this blog post we will take a look at the details regarding the changes we have made to our controls.
Accessibility is becoming increasingly popular for websites and critically important for their success. The idea behind accessible website applications is allowing people with disabilities or limited access to Internet to freely navigate your content. This could be achieved by adding additional attributes and elements which could be used by special readers to provide more in depth information for what certain part of a web application is used for. We at Telerik are following world standards for our controls in order to ensure the best end user experience.
Following WC3 Specifications we have made four major changes to the html rendering described below:
The improvements are mainly concentrated on our complex controls – RadPivotGrid,RadGrid and RadTreeList. However, we have added a header row to the RadDatePicker, RadTimePicker, RadDateTimePicker controls.
We are happy to announce that even our new mighty PivotGrid for ASP.NET AJAX brings Accessibility support. We have added a set of properties under RadPivotGrid.AccessibilitySettings and additional properties under RadPivotGrid.PagerStyle for controls that are placed in the pager.
We made a huge progress in supporting a lot more functionalities for our ASP.NET Grid control. Here is a list of the new set of properties.
The RadTreeList has similar properties to what we implemented in RadGrid – RadTreeList.PagerStyle, column properties and RadTreeList.EditFormSettings. In addition, if you want to set the Expand and Collapse button title attributes, you can find the associated properties under RadTreeList.ClientSettings.ClientMessages.
We have worked hard to improve our support for features that could enable people with disabilities to easily use our controls. You could go through the demos below which showcase the functionality described in the article.
Additionally, if you need some help understanding all the various properties the help articles below will surely help you through the process of implementation.
By the way, don’t forget to sign up for our What’s New Webinar on Mar 5th. Our evangelist Jeff Fritz will walk you through all the new stuff and you can get answers to your questions live. Just for fun, some of you attending the live event will walk away with a Telerik .NET Ninja t-shirt and a ThinkGeek gift card. Register for What's New Webinar
Antonio Stoilkov is passionate about sports and loves to learn new things regardless if it is about the next quantum computer advancement or a new keyboard shortcut.