Presenter - Chris Mills – Opera Software
How do we extend Accessibility across all of the web enabled devices out there?
What opportunities do new technologies offer us? (HTML5 and CSS3 in terms of accessibility)
Accessibility as Universal Design
Improve things for everyone from a screen reader to a tiny little mobile phone
We are now building for smartphones, tablets, TVs, game consoles, etc. The web is everywhere now
iPhone paved the way for a great standards based UX support for phones
There is even a good screenreader on the iPhone 3GS
WAI-ARIA support is making its way into mobile browsers
Mobile IE is the big exception to mobile accessibility
Android has great standards support thanks to Webkit
If you have a mobile device based on Webkit you are probably going to be in an OK situation with accessibility. Need to be careful though since there are a lot of fragmented version of Webkit out there at the moment.
Outside of the rich west, most "feature phones" are pretty crappy. We are not the same as our users. Need to really make sure we are targeting our mobile dev for our target market.
A lot of TVs and consumer products have chosen to leverage Webkit or the Opera SDK. Good accessibility in the background but not implemented on the front end.
Beyond browsers there are lots of problems with the actual devices they run on
General lack of assistive technology on most devices. Mobile devices are almost like where we were ten years ago in terms of desktop support.
Screen sizes are ALL over the place.
Devices cannot support heavy processing or bandwidth intensive activities at the moment
Controls tend to vary pretty widely across devices...
Current mobile devices not supporting plugins, but not a huge deal thanks to forward thinking support for HTML5
Overall Accessibility on alternative devices is "a real pain in the ass"
How are we addressing this and solving things? Going back to the old school.
Since ARIA Javascript is not widely supported we need to think about fallbacks. Nice clean HTML that works without JS
Must make core content still accessible
Always create a baseline of content that is accessible without things like JS
Layer on enhancements
If you want to use AJAX that is great but you need a fall back to a full page refresh
If you are going to support a mobile version of your site make sure it is a quality experience. Should always give users option to jump over to the full non mobile site.
Graded support...
No need to write a mobile app that is iPhone only. If you keep layouts fluid and degrade nicely they should work everywhere. Keep graphics minimal, keep data entry to a minimum, test across as many devices as you can. Users are most likely to select from lists as they work the most consistently across devices.
Keep HTTP requests to a minimum, user CSS Sprites, minimize JS as much as possible. Keep it LEAN.
W3C mobile best practices are very similar to WCAG best practices.
WAI-ARIA 2 is supposed to focus more on Mobile once it gets rolling.
AndreG
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