Making web sites for a mobile devices and people with disabilities

The World Wide Web Consortium has released the final version of "Shared Web Experiences: Barriers Common to Mobile Device Users and People with Disabilities". This is intended to help those designing web sites for both mobile and disabled users. It catalogues the overlap between the W3C's mobile and accessibility standards. This is useful, but is is disappointing that W3C have failed to get their standards writers to agree on one common standard. Instead of having on standard, the W3C has two standards which say much the same thing, and leave it to each web designer to try to reconcile the differences themselves.

Contents

• Perceivable
  • Information conveyed solely with color
  • Large pages or large images
  • Multimedia with no captions
  • Audio-only prompts (beeps) for important information (warnings, errors)
  • Embedded non-text objects (images, sound, video) with no text alternative
  • Important information in non-text content (images, multimedia)
  • Free-text entry (for example, alphabetical characters allowed in numeric fields)
  • Content formatted using tables or CSS, and reading order not correct when linearized (for example when CSS or tables not rendered)
  • Information conveyed only using CSS (visual formatting)
• Operable
  • Mouse required for interaction and navigation
  • Scripting required to operate or generate content
  • Special plugin required
  • Missing or inappropriate page title
  • Inconsistency between focus (tab) order and logical document content sequence
  • Non descriptive link label
• Understandable
  • Long words, long and complex sentences, jargon
  • Content spawning new windows without warning user
  • Blinking, moving, scrolling or auto-updating content
• Robust
  • Invalid or unsupported markup