The rise and rise of mobile sites

There's an article in this week's NMA about how 60% of consumers think it's important to be able to access the internet from their mobile, and 65% of those who are planning to buy a phone in the next year will be looking for a good mobile internet experience. Surely the iPhone and Twitter are partly responsible for this rise?? There are a couple of things this means for the digital industry - firstly we'll all need to make sure that the sites we build are easily 'readable' on mobiles and secondly more brands are demanding mobile-specific sites - sites built specifically for mobile access. Will it be restricted to certain sectors? The NMA article suggests that banks, sport, travel, social networking, local amenities/guides and ticket purchasing would all benefit - and having mobile access to Wikipedia would settle a few pub arguments - and make pub quizzes a cinch!

By Kate Wooding
Published: 19 June 2008
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Text-only version of your site?

In the past, sites had no real structure and multimedia elements were used heavily without any thought of alternate content.

When these sites had to be made accessible the knee-jerk reaction was often to create a text-only version of the site. This allowed those unable to access the main site a means of reading the content, but at a cost.

Adding a text-only site in those days effectively doubled the web team's workload as it was a whole other site to maintain. Text-only sites contained content that was incomplete or of lower quality and over time gradually became more and more out of sync with the main site. An often used analogy, is the idea of having a restaurant where quality food is served upstairs and passable food is served on the ground floor in the kitchen. Diners unable to tackle the stairs are forced to have a lower quality experience. The dual-site approach ticked all the boxes for accessibility in theory, but in practice rarely offered value.

To counter these problems, text-only sites became dynamic and shared the databases that powered the live site. The main site would then link off to a 'text only' site (the same site, but using different HTML templates that removed all styling). This was an improvement, but it missed an important point.

Most screen-readers and assistive technologies work by screen scraping; reading all the visible text on the page. This happens regardless of whether the site is text-only or not. Although text-only sites can help users who have visual difficulties, a better approach would be to provide alternative colour schemes or advise and educate the user on how to create and apply user stylesheets.

To make sure that assitive technologies can make sense of your website, it is more important to structure your pages well. The templates supplied with your website will give you a good base structure to work from, but it's important that the copy you add through the CMS maintains the standard.

Good structuring tips include using heading elements rather than simply making text bold (and bigger!) to both clarify what the following section is about and to create a heirarchy (e.g. h3 is considered a sub-section of h2). Additionally, when creating links to other pages it's good practice to ensure that the linking text makes sense when read out of context - try to resist typing 'click here'!

By taking accessibility into account at the start of a project and making it a part of the project instead of a bolt-on as in the past, your site will be more accessible with less effort. With a little care, keeping your site maintained and accessible to all can be a piece of cake. Stop trying to be accessible and start being accessible!

By Andrew Donaldson
Published: 7 November 2007
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