Section 508 and alt-text

Today I spent fair amount of time researching screen readers programs to satisfy rules of section 508.
Actually I was intrigued by the idea to find free screen-reader program. I found several programs, but all of them don't read alt-text. The best FREE choice is NVDA (http://www.nvda-project.org/). The program reads out all links which is quite comfortable. I continued my search and found that only some of the screen reader programs CAN read alt-text. One of them is JAWS
(http://www.freedomscientific.com/products/fs/jaws-product-page.asp). JAWS is quite popular in software community.

List of screen reader programs

Actually I found another interesting site. It's a site of The HiSoftware CynthiaSays portal
(joint Education and Outreach project of HiSoftware, ICDRI, and the Internet Society Disability and Special Needs Chapter). Using the site you can check if your site is section 508 complaint. It generates quite good and detailed report. I really like the fact, that we can test compatibility before submitting the site. Previously I used the similar site for HTML-quality code. With HTML5 implementation, I'm not sure, that the html-validator will work good as it used to be.

How to add the custom theme to SharePoint-site.

Now I learned enough to begin customizations of my SharePoint sites. Unexpectable for me, I found a lot of short tutorials about SharePoint in www.youtube.com
First of all, I found excellent promoting videos for my presentation. Some companies posted case studies about SharePoint as new document management technology.
At my surprise, Coca-Cola has around 1,000 SharePoint sites, using SharePoint Monsanto increased work efficiency by 40%, even non-profit organizations such as
Leukemia & Lymphoid Society implemented SharePoint. Comcast offers SharePoint site as a part of their business internet package.

For now, I found a very good short tutorial to customize a theme on my site. It's really helpful.
Watch the video

.NET GURUS CAN COOK!

Yes, they can cook and bake. They even putted together a small cookbook for us. I think, it's interesting. Enjoy the recipes created by computer gurus.
I hope, each of you will find a tasteful recipe to prepare.
Download the book

Section 508 and ASP.NET

This is my second post about section 508. This time it's related to asp-server control Menu.
There are 2 attributes such as DynamicPopOutImageUrl and StaticPopOutImageUrl which is often used for building a Menu. Both of these attributes MUST be accompanied by another 2 attributes such as DynamicPopOutImageTextFormatString and StaticPopOutImageTextFormatString respectevely for proper implementation rules of section 508. Both of these attributes generate text for image alt attribute. It's quite important moment because menu plays an significant role on a web-page.

Actually I did not find much information about it on Internet. Therefore I decided to post a couple words about it.

Display data in label field and have line breaks that user entered in textbox

I received a request to modify a text to keep a line breaks previously entered in textbox. I tried several different methods to accomplish this task. The best solution is

<asp:Label ID="commentLabel" runat="server" Text='<%# Eval("comment").ToString().Replace(vbCRLF, "<br/>") %>' Wrap="true" />

It works very well. Thanks Forums.asp.net for quick and very elegant solution. My coworker have already whispered "Alla, Good Job!" It makes my day!

Understanding the RESX Resource Files

(from article Peter Morath)

"When you first start looking through a SharePoint 2010 aspx page you realize that there isn’t an awful lot of actual changeable code in them. Its is pretty much impossible to decode the cryptic references used by the ASP.NET controls, such as text boxes, labels."

For example: <SharePoint:EncodedLiteral runat="server" text="<%$Resources:wss,login_pageUserName%>" EncodeMethod='HtmlEncode'/>

You’ve found the wss.resx file under "drive:\inetput\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\app_name\App_GlobalResources".
Open the wss.resx file in text or application editor such Visual Studio 2010 or Notepad++ and find variable "login_pageUserName"

For example:
<data name="login_pageUserName">
<value>User name:</value>
</data>

To change the value of login_pageUserName (text), please rename this variable in aspx-file. For example, login_pageUserName_new
<SharePoint:EncodedLiteral runat="server" text="<%$Resources:wss,login_pageUserName_new%>" EncodeMethod='HtmlEncode'/>

And add new data element in wss.resx file such as
<data name="login_pageUserName_new">
<value>Customer name:</value>
</data>

If you were to change the contents between the <value>…</value> tags, the changes would be picked up by all aspx pages that referenced it.

Requirement analysis

How to conduct a proper requirement analysis?..

Here are some sites with useful information for requirement analysis

1. Wikipedia
2. Tips to gather business requirements
3. Mind tools
4. Business requirements for Sharepoint projects

Tomorrow I'm beginning to gather requirements for my first Sharepoint project.

First Sharepoint site

Here's my first Sharepoint site. I'm still very beginner in Sharepoint and search for any good tutorials, especially video-ones. If you know, please leave a comment.

The Ultimate Guide to Twitter Optimization

I really like to read about new ideas for SEO. It brings a lot of new information and interesting things. Therefore I subscribe and often read Website magazine. This time I found an interesting article about Twitter Optimization.
I'm not the biggest Twitter fan, but it looks like this tool take a lot of attention and many people use it, someone of them even for business needs. Business needs require a business logic. So, twitter came up with own optimization techniques. Here they are:
read this
 It's quite interesting what do you think about them, do you use them?

Step-By-Step

I'm facing my first project with Sharepoint. As a beginner, I need some basic knowledge about Sharepoint.
A coworker borrowed me a very good book for beginners. It's "Microsoft® Windows® SharePoint® Services 3.0 Step by Step" by
Olga Londer, Bill English, Todd Bleeker and Penelope Coventry. I'm doing my steps through book and software. Wish me GOOD LUCK!

How to combine three columns into one column using SQL?

I need to display SSN as one datacolumn in Gridview. My data is in 3 different table fields. As I found, there is no way to combine data using BoundField.
Therefore, I use SQL statement to concatenate 3 fields together. Here is a statement:
SELECT studentid, fname, mi, lname, dob, (ss1 + '-' + ss2 + '-' + ss3) as ssn FROM students order by studentid asc

Now I can easily display SSN in GridView:
<asp:BoundField DataField="ssn" HeaderText="SSN#" SortExpression="ssn" />