TiVo in Australia: Mobile Web Interface

One of the news items I found about PVRs refereed to an interface for iPhones. TiVo has the Central Online web interface, for remotely controlling a TiVo (not yet available for Australia). A quick check with Opera Small Screen Rendering showed the web page adjusted reasonably well to a small screen. So I ran some more tests. Compatibility with smartphones, should not be too hard, especially for iPhone. TiVo could start by adding a mobile style sheet.

Web Accessibility Test of TiVo Central Online

A Test Accessibility Web (TAW 3.0 8/9/08 1:57 AM) validation test for conformance to WAI guidelines, W3C Recommendation 5 May 1999 on http://www3.tivo.com/tivo-tco/index.do reported these issues:

Test summary outcome

	Automatic	Human review
Priority 1	4	55
Priority 2	15	54
Priority 3	4	21

This is not as bad as it looks, with most being easily fixed, such as missing text equivalents (captions) for images:

• Verify that text equivalent for image is useful
• Missing text equivalent for image (3)
• • Line 660:
  • Line 677:
  • Line 694: ...
    

W3C Markup Validator Test of TiVo Central Online

The W3C Markup Validator, found 28 Errors. The validation makes fussy checks for things like "&" in URLs (you are supposed to use "&" but most page designers don't). Others were about older HTML code being used in a XHTML document. These errors will not matter with a desktop browser, but may cause problems with limited TV and mobile browsers.

W3C mobileOK Checker Test of TiVo Central Online

The very much more specific W3C mobileOK Checker [Beta], not surprisingly found the page was "not mobileOK Basic":

Summary

1. Tests failed: 9 / 25
2. Tests passed: 16 / 25
3. Warnings: 49

Mobile Okay specify the use of the very restrictive XHTML Basic, whereas the TiVo page is the more relaxed XHTML Transitional. Mobile Okay also recommends limiting the use of other resources. In some cases these limits would be too restrictive for a regular web page, but for something like a TV guide they should be mostly achievable, to make a web site suitable for desktop web browsers and mobile ones. Some of the issues are easly fixed, such as lack of a page title:

1. EXTERNAL_RESOURCES

2. Related best practice: [EXTERNAL_RESOURCES] Keep the number of externally linked resources to a minimum.

   • The HTTP status code is 404 or 5xx (in response to the resource http://www3.tivo.com/assets/images/shared/ ...
     and the response relates to a request for an included resource
   • There are more than 10 embedded external resources ...
3. GRAPHICS_FOR_SPACING

   Related best practice: [GRAPHICS_FOR_SPACING] Do not use graphics for spacing.

   • The HTTP status code is 404 or 5xx (in response to the resource http://www3.tivo.com/assets/images/shared/ ...
     and the response relates to a request for an included resource
   • There is a small fully transparent image ...
4. IMAGES_RESIZING and IMAGES_SPECIFY_SIZE

   Related best practices: [IMAGES_RESIZING] Resize images at the server, if they have an intrinsic size. [IMAGES_SPECIFY_SIZE] Specify the size of images in markup, if they have an intrinsic size. ...

   • Either the height or width attribute is missing ...
5. NON_TEXT_ALTERNATIVES

   Related best practice: [NON-TEXT_ALTERNATIVES] Provide a text equivalent for every non-text element.

   • The alt attribute is missing ...
6. NO_FRAMES

   Related best practice: [NO_FRAMES] Do not use frames.

   • The document contains a frame, frameset or iframe element
7. PAGE_SIZE_LIMIT

   Related best practice:
   [PAGE_SIZE_LIMIT] Ensure that the overall size of page is appropriate to the memory limitations of the device.

   • The size of the document's markup (42190 bytes) exceeds 10 kilobytes
   • The total size of the page (230077 bytes) exceeds 20 kilobytes (Primary document: 42190, Images: 187887, Style sheets: 0) ...
     
8. PAGE_TITLE

   Related best practice:
   [PAGE_TITLE] Provide a short but descriptive page title.

   • There is no page title ...