iheni :: making the web worldwide

A little nugget of gold appeared in my RSS feed today. W3C is running a free four week online course: An Introduction to W3C’s Mobile Web Best Practices, May 26 to June 20 2008.

This is great news as since publication of the Mobile Web Best Practices (MWBP) in 2006 the Mobile Web Initiative and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) have done great work flagging up the cross over between mobile and web accessibility. So if you’re an accessibility advocate or just want to know what needs to be done to make your content mobile (and therefore more accessible) sign up and I’ll see you there.

Tags: accessibility, mobile, w3c

The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) have just announced that WCAG 2.0 is to go into Candidate Recommendation.

This is the final stage before WCAG 2.0 formally takes over from WCAG 1.0 and means two things:

1. Feedback from the community received by the WCAG Working Group has been reviewed and a broad consensus on the technical content has been met.

2. The Guidelines are now ready to be tested by the community on their web projects and the Working Group is looking for feedback on implementations.

If you want to get involved in providing feedback then the WCAG Working Group ask that let them know by 23 May 2008. Actual implementations are due by 30 June 2008. This seems like a pretty short timespan but your feedback does not have to be based on an entire site being built to WCAG 2.0, it can only be sections or parts. What the Working Group are after are good examples of implementations of guidelines under WCAG 2.0.

To find out how to provide feedback visit Instructions for Commenting on WCAG 2.0 Documents

The different WCAG 2.0 documents that the WCAG Working Group updated with this publication are introduced in Overview of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 Documents.

To find out more about it visit the W3C Questions and Answers blog.

Tags: wcag

One of the readers of this blog has been in touch a couple of time to let me know about the Open Letter Initiative for blind mobile phone users.

This letter is addressed to any company with an intrest in mobile technologies including developers, research scientists, organisations and politicians. The open letter informs about the perfect mobile device for blind persons, screen reader software for mobile platforms, mobile internet access, satellite navigation for blind pedestrians, mobile access to map data, accuracy of GPS receivers, self-help, commonalities of blindness and dyslexia/illiteracy, accessibility, corporate responsibility, proposals for Nokia’s and Google’s public relations and the importance of free software and affordable cell phones for the many blind people from developing or newly industrializing countries.

Help the initiative by promoting it to friend, family, within your workplace or via your blogs. Many thanks Per for the tip off.

The Colour Contrast Analyser for Mac is now available in Chinese, download a copy from The Paciello Group. The work these guys are doing internationalising their tools is fantastic. Well done Steve, Jedi and the team.

Tags: accessibility, Chinese, tools, translation

Last week I presented on the overlap between web and mobile accessibility at WWW 2008 in Beijing. It’s a pretty short presentation as I only had a 15 minute slot but in it I look at what are the shared barriers of access and touch on some example solutions.

Making the web accessible both for mobile devices and people with disabilities

Tags: accessibility, mobile, presentation