The fine line between mobility and accessibility

By Lis Shorten

A recent discussion about the nature of mobile applications got me thinking about the many overlaps between accessibility web design and content designed specifically for mobile phone users.

It’s not a huge leap of imagination – after all it’s inevitable that there will be some similarities between the barriers faced by individuals who are differently abled and individuals attempting to enable online services with different platforms and appliances. Wouldn’t it make sense to apply some of the knowledge and skills learnt in making web access more accessible to improving the mobile web experience?

Let’s take images as an obvious example. Mobile users frustrated at their speed of access or their stretched bandwidth related tariffs, might be happier without images as long as they could rely on non-visual support mechanisms. Like blind web users using screen readers, they would expect to be able to rely on intelligent alternative text to convey equivalent interpretations.

Links are another important issue. Blind people using screen readers require link text to be short, succinct and to clearly describe where they lead. Links that read ‘click here’ aren’t very useful for accessible navigation, but equally they can prove expensive and a waste of time for mobile users repeatedly following unwanted links.

And what about the issue of clunky keyboard navigation? People with different abilities can’t always use a mouse, while many mobile devices simply don’t have joypads or touchscreens. Faced with a list of a hundred links, simply bashing a tab key or similar can be awkward, take an age and may prove fatiguing. This eventuality needs to be taken into account in the original site design by using more intelligent menus, skip links and accessible navigation controls.

Just because some modern smart phones have some features that overcome some problems – the Blackberry scroller and the iPhone touchscreen both have their moments, granted – doesn’t mean we should overlook the role of fundamentally good design in all this. Some things are pretty obvious, like making app GUIs accessible from the outset, making text size scalable or adding voiceovers where appropriate. But other considerations are easier to miss. What about making cameras and camera phones accessible for the blind for example? Some people might think the blind have no use for cameras, but how useful would it be for somebody who is visually impaired to be able to easily snap a food carton or set of appliance instructions, and then MMS them to a friend to read to them over the phone?

At the very least, we all need to give this area a little more thought. The more we examine these issues, the more obvious it will become that following tried and tested web accessibility best practice is the not only the best way of making online content more accessible to differently abled desktop users, it will also help out all mobile users.

Guidance in this area is provided by WCAG 2.0, the W3C’s web content accessibility guidelines. The latest guidance for mobile phones is the MWBP (Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0)

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