I’ve been thinking about the mobile web today. Accessible web design is all about providing access to web-based information to all users and platforms – and the mobile web is a fast-growing and very challenging area.

The biggest challenge with mobile web design is the fact that you just can’t test it very easily. There are dozens of mobile browsers and related products.

Opera has supplied options to test for small screens in their browser for quite some time, but that only provides testing for Opera’s interpretations. Every web enabled phone provides a browser of some sort – many of them have created their own browsers. Some use obscure custom browsers.

And Google has now announced their own lightweight mobile interpreter for pages accessed through a search from a mobile phone. This is all wonderful, but it’s a herculean task to test for all of these options (not to mention all of the phone charges and extra handhelds one would need to acquire!).

All of these services have their own interpretation of web standards (or non-interpretation, as the case may be). Support for HTML, CSS, and handheld specific style sheets is very spotty. However, a well-constructed page will usually degrade gracefully in a mobile browser. Not always, of course, but there are certainly things you can do which will help.

• Use proportional widths.

  Handheld browsers usually have very small screens – the largest screen I know of is on the Hiptop from Danger, measuring in at a massive 240 pixels. Nobody likes side-scrolling! If you use a proportional width you can avoid this problem.

• Place your page elements in a logical order.

  Which comes first, the content or the navigation? Neither is a great solution – if your visitor is going to an article, they want content. If they’re looking for an article, they want navigation. You’ll have to make a choice – but I feel this is where internal page navigation is a must. Provide just a few links to navigate around the page – Skip to Navigation, Skip to Content, perhaps even a dynamic link to visit the most recent article published! These can go at the very top of the page, allowing you to organize your page as you need. I still am inclined to recommend that content comes before main navigation, however.

• Follow web standards

  Despite the fact that support for standards is not good amongst handheld browsers, you should always strive for standards. Unless you have a tremendous development budget which can support redevelopment of your mobile interface everytime a new browser comes out, you need to plan for the future. It is a better bet that the future of handheld browsers will tend towads standards than not.

This is a minuscule part of what you can do to improve your mobile web presence – Cameron Moll is writing a four-part series which provides detailed and extensive tips for mobile web design.

The Washington Examiner, a local paper published in Washington DC and nearby areas, published an editorial on February 20th suggesting that legal enforcement of accessibility requirements for web sites may not be constitutional under the first amendment.

The editorial quotes an unnamed Supreme Court decision:

The choice of material to go into a newspaper, and the decisions made as to limitations on the size and content of the paper, and treatment of public issues and public officials — whether fair or unfair — constitute the exercise of editorial control and judgment. It has yet to be demonstrated how governmental regulation of this crucial process can be exercised consistent with First Amendment guarantees of a free press.

Although the editorial does not name the decision, it is a particular citation which has appeared frequently in the news lately in relation to the prophet Muhammad cartoon riots. The case, Miami Publishing Company v. Tornillo (1974), is concerned with a Florida law "which provides that if a candidate for nomination or election is assailed regarding his personal character or official record by any newspaper, the candidate has the right to demand that the newspaper print, free of cost to the candidate, any reply the candidate may make to the newspaper’s charges."

The law was ruled unconstitutional on the grounds that no law may either require the publication of material or deny the right to publish it, as either action is an infringement on the editorial right of the publication to choose what it will say.

The majority opinion of the court discusses changes in publication media extensively. The statement is too lengthy to quote here, but I will attempt to summarize. Justice Burger discusses the culture of ideas as a free-market which had existed through the variety of news publishing which existed at the compilation of the Bill of Rights. He noticed that the consolidation of media which had occurred by 1974 has had a singular effect on this culture, creating a homogeneity which has created a culture prone to bias and manipulation by those few individuals at the controls.

From this premise it is reasoned that the only effective way to insure fairness and accuracy and to provide for some accountability is for government to take affirmative action. The First Amendment interest of the public in being informed is said to be in peril because the "marketplace of ideas" is today a monopoly controlled by the owners of the market….

The opinion continues to condemn any governmental action which would control the media since press responsibility is not a part of the constitution and can not be legislated.

Does this opinion exhibit evidence that it stands as a barrier to any potential accessibility law? Yes, absolutely. It is quite clear that this opinion has considered relevant issues. The opinion explicitly states that the government has no right to legislate access to information.

Nonetheless, the world has changed, and continues to change. It all comes down to constitutional interpretation. This 1974 decision does not address issues of accessibility as it regards the disabled. This issue may be of significance. Can the disabled be denied equal rights to physically abled people? No, of course not. But the failure to grant them legislated rights is not equivalent to a denial of equal rights. Under the Ninth Amendment, the enumeration of rights may not be construed to represent the denial of other rights.

As it stands, there are valid arguments that the First Amendment could abrogate any obligation of web site owners to provide accessibility. The US constitution could be interpreted to allow owners to make the decision that their information will not be accessible to disabled users.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens.

I’ve been giving some thought lately to the subject of web semantics. In short, web semantics are the application of structural meaning using HTML markup. For a more palatable explanation of web semantics and their benefits for your website, I’ve written a new little article – Web Semantics and HTML Structure.

Happy New Year! In the past month, I’ve spent most of my time being socially active, with my mother visiting me from the US, but have still managed to spend a good chunk of time learning.

Amongst the things I’ve learned in the past week is good deal of valuable information concerning Accesskeys – for a brief overview, Accesskeys are a method to provide web users with a keyboard shortcut to visit pages within a website. They are a strongly encourage part of most guidelines towards web accessibility – but there are some strong opponents to this thought. This has prompted me to write up a new article – Accesskeys – Curse or Blessing?

Busy day today! I’ve done extensive modifications to this site – eliminating the old styles altogether, but increasing the overall accessibility of the site at last.
It’s been frustrating to me to not have the time to fix that aspect of this site, but at last, it’s moved along. But I had some motivation! Today I was
accepted into the Guild of Accessible Web Designers, which is very encouraging. The application process is brutal!

Well … no, not really. Actually, the person who reviewed my application site (the Conscientious Home) was very nice.
He pointed me to a few errors in validation I’d missed and made some great suggestions about other accessibility issues I might want to look into.