I've been reading Universal Design for Web Applications by Wendy Chisholm and Matt May. Chisholm and May's main point is that the proportion of users that are accessing the Web using a mobile device is growing fast, with many of these users having no access whatever to a conventional large-screen device. So making web sites work on mobile devices is no longer an option unless you want to exclude a large number of potential users. Universal Design provides concentrated and apparently feasible - if fiddly - advice on how to make web applications that conform to the Level A "Success Criteria" of the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, taking account of W3C's Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0. One weakness that struck me was the book's rather superficial treatment of content management systems (CMS) - like TypePad that I use for Fortnightly Mailing, and how a user-in-the-street should tackle ensuring conformance when their CMS does not do this by default - as in the case of TypePad.
Previous relevant Fortnightly Mailing posts:
- Test the mobile-readiness of a web site - 1 June 2007;
- Sharp critique of WCAG 2.0, with comments by Stephen Brown and Jonathan Grove (whom I have asked fix the dead link) - 25 May 2006;
- Improving the accessibility of your web site - 9 May 2006.
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