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I tried to answer the question “Is the mobile web enabled or disabled by design?”, in other words can one web work for mobile users with disabilities? After much talk with people and feedback from my presentation my thoughts on this have evolved to the following:

• Mobile development is at a cross roads just as desktop development was in the late 90s with a danger of separate versions, building for single platforms/browsers, reliance on proprietary technologies and ignoring web standards biting at our heels
• We should focus on one content source, multiple delivery mechanisms (CSS Media Queries, personalisation, geolocation etc)
• We can learn from our mistakes of the late 90s on desktop and skip to progressive enhancement, one web, cross browser compatibility and web standards
• We are all disabled to some extent on mobile – this may influence better usability and accessibility overall
• Mobile development may, in time, inform better web development on desktop
• We need common accessibility APIs on mobile to support text-to-speech / screen reader output (pretty please)
• Widgets are the way forward (more of that later)

I’ve gone into more depth on this in thoughts on making the mobile web accessible.

What next?

My research has showed me that there really isn’t a lot of information out there on how to make mobile browsing accessible. What’s key however is to remember that while there is a cross over between difficulties all users experience on a mobile and difficulties experiences by disabled users on the desktop  we can’t lump them together – we need to work to understand issues specific to disabled users and how to address them.

There are a number of great people out there already working in this area and starting to talk about findings and research. Ones to watch are:

• Per Busch – Per often tweets about mobile access and iPhone accessibility (using the hash tag #iphoneaccess). He also keeps an updated wiki on iPhone accessibility.
• Veronika Jermolina – AbilityNet consultant researching mobile access as a whole. Not to be missed is her Techshare presentation on the accessibility of mobile services.
• Text to speech library for Anroid – A Google group discussing possibilities and realities.
• Mobile Active – While Mobile Active has a broader remit to connect “people, organizations, and resources using mobile technology for social change” it looks at mobile accessibility as part of this.
• Damon Rose BBC Ouch! – Damon often blogs about mobile access issues and has good insight into the issues people face.
• BBC web development guidelines – under the careful eye of Lucy Dodd, the Beeb is looking at writing guidelines for accessible mobile web development.

If you know of any other people, initiatives or pieces of research flying around let me know and I’ll update this list.

It was fascinating to find out about what is happening in India with regards to web accessibility and talk to different people, learn what the drivers are and what needs to be done to promote accessibility. As an invited guest blogger on the UN Global Initiative for Inclusive ICT (G3ICT) I pulled these thoughts into an article. This, I hope, will be the first of a series of articles looking at web accessibility in various locales. Next will be China as I’ll be speaking about the cross over between web and mobile accessibility at the WWW 2008 Conference and gathering information there in April.

Read Putting accessibility to information centre stage in India