Convergent needs of mobiles and accessibility
With all the (technical) media interest in the iPhone I decided it was worth taking a look at the iPod Touch to test out its new web browsing features. Other handheld devices and mobile phones have gone down the route of reducing a web page to fit the restricted environment of the screen, as can be seen in the screenshots for Internet Explorer Mobile. However there seems to be a trend for this paradigm of using a normal page but zooming in & out and scrolling around with your fingers. For example the new mobile operating system that Google have developed (Android) has similar features, as can be seen in this demonstration.
As I’ve been testing it out I have been struck by the similarities with the screen magnifier demonstration that I posted about before. There have been discussions in the past about the link between improving your search engine ranking and meeting accessibility requirements through the same techiniques (for example this article on A List Apart). We may find that the (possible) rise of the mobile web continues this trend. For example I’ve noticed that with the iPod I’ve wanted:
- layout and navigation conventions maintained - as with the screen magnifier you need to know where you are on a page and how to get to the content that interests you when you’ve zoomed in to see some detail
- space around links - ironically it’s harder to use some web sites that have been designed for standard handheld devices as you don’t have the same degree of accuracy if you’re pointing at a link with your finger rather than a stylus, this is similar to the experience desktop users will have with poor hand-eye co-ordination
- alternatives to scripting - the iPod Touch doesn’t support Flash at the moment so I’ve come to a shuddering halt with some sites that rely on this technology, so I could find something to see at the Watershed but not St George’s and couldn’t go into sysadmin mode with Google Analytics when I wanted to check up on clients’ websites
