Section 508 Compliant HTML Spreadsheet

Question

I'm looking for an embedded javascript spreadsheet tool that I can put into my website. It must comply with the US government section 508 accessibility guidelines. Ideally, I would like to find a free tool, but a widget which costs a few hundred dollars wouldn't be an issue.

An example of a tool which does what I want, but does not seem to have a section 508 compatibility statement is http://handsontable.com/ (if someone does see a statement on their website listing section 508 compliance, then it would be exactly what I'm looking for, but I couldn't find one).

Any suggestions for a good, accessible HTML spreadsheet tool?

Answer 1

Google Sheets has a page outlining its Section 508 Compliance on the accessibility page. It says it is supported "with exceptions". I couldn't find any information on Section 508 for Microsoft Excel Online specifically, but found a page about general accessibilty. Both of these services offer a way to embed spreadsheets into HTML.

For Google Sheets, you can publish to the web, but that makes it open to everyone and I'm pretty sure is not able to make it editable. A better solution I found is by just putting the URL to the sheet into an iframe. It works just fine and it follows the sharing settings you have, ie. anyone you share it with has to be signed into Google to view it. Here's an example of an iframe:

<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/document/d/2-lAS61_wEoIo...csrST/edit"></iframe>

And if you want to show it without edit capabilities, just replace /edit with /preview.

With a bit of quick searching, I was not able to find a way to embed an editable spreadsheet with Office Online, but I'm sure there must be away. To embed a read-only version, you would go to File > Share > Embed. Then copy and paste the code from there.