I am really interested in knowing if DNN ever has any plans in future versions to adhere to accessibility guidelines, in particular 508 compliance. This type of compliance is very important when working with federal clients or clients that receive federal funding such as public universities, etc.

The Rehabilitation Act Amendments (Section 508)

On August 7, 1998, President Clinton signed into law the Rehabilitation Act Amendments of 1998 which covers access to federally funded programs and services. The law strengthens section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act and requires access to electronic and information technology provided by the Federal government. The law applies to all Federal agencies when they develop, procure, maintain, or use electronic and information technology. Federal agencies must ensure that this technology is accessible to employees and members of the public with disabilities to the extent it does not pose an "undue burden." Section 508 speaks to various means for disseminating information, including computers, software, and electronic office equipment. It applies to, but is not solely focused on, Federal pages on the Internet or the World Wide Web. It does not apply to web pages of private industry.

It is more than possible to create asp.net web pages that adhere to 508 guidelines. A web page and application should always strive to fully function without the need of javascript and the utilize javascript to enhance (not replace) the functionality of a given feature or function. My siggestion to the DNN Corp would be to brush up on Progressive Enhancement methodologies and Unobtrusive Javascript in order to properly address these issues in the future.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtrusive_JavaScript

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/understandingprogressiveenhancement/

just realised the title on your post and thought I'd add a note - there is nothing in either ADA508 or WCAG specifications that mandates not using javascript. As asp.net webforms use javascript heavily (to simulate eventing), disabling it is not a valid scenario - if you need that level of non-javascript then asp.net MVC may be a better approach. There is a misconception that screen-readers can't handle javascript, in fact they can handle a lot of it - http://northtemple.com/2008/10/07/javascript-and-screen-readers has a reasonably up to date list of what JAWS handles. We're still waiting on the w3c to publish their final recommendation for WAI-ARIA (http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/aria), so we then have a definitive list and can search through our code to update it to make DotNetNuke WAI-ARIA compliant out of the box.

---

Buy the new Professional DNN7: Open Source .NET CMS Platform book Amazon US