Re: [WSG] Mobile sites

[Phil Archer]

I think it's worth noting that there is a lot of commonality between 
accessibility and mobile optimisation. When the W3C Mobile Web Best 
Practices Group began its work (way back in June 2005 - I'm feeling old) 
our starting point was WCAG. They're not the same, of course, but the 
ways of thinking do share a lot. Designing accessible sites means making 
very few, if any, assumptions that given features will be available to 
all your users and therefore coding to offer various 
fallbacks/alternatives. On mobile, you're targeting devices that *may* 
be restricted in their capabilities.


Others have advocated looking at logs to see which devices your users 
are accessing the site with. That's always an important data point of 
course, but beware: if the only mobile devices accessing your site are 
top end smartphones that could be telling you that those are the only 
mobile devices that *can* use your site, not that others (the majority) 
are not interested in what you have to offer.


I agree the RWD gets you a long way - we advocate and teach it on the 
W3C Mobile Web course that Frances de Waal and I run - but it only 
answers style adaptation. A properly mobile-friendly site is likely to 
offer (slightly) different content too. At a simple level this means 
different sized images but it's deeper than that. Mobile users will 
often have different priorities than those browsing on a desktop and 
that can affect what you present as well as how you present it.


My mantra is content adaptation should be done server side, style 
adaptation is done client side. Do it right and you almost certainly do 
not need a separate mobile site. More ramblings at 
http://philarcher.org/diary/2011/mobilecontentandstyle/


HTH

Phil.

--


Phil Archer
W3C eGovernment
http://www.w3.org/egov/

http://philarcher.org
@philarcher1


On 16/05/2012 03:43, grant_malcolm_bai...@westnet.com.au wrote:

Hello,

I was wondering whether having a dedicated mobile site represents an 
improvement with regard to accessibility and standards, or whether it is 
acceptable to have a single site that is adaptable to different screen widths 
(e.g. by means of CSS media queries). Of course, setting up a separate mobile 
site requires additional work and therefore expense.

I would be grateful for comments.

Thank you and regards,

Grant Bailey

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RE: [WSG] Mobile sites

[Birendra Patel]

Hi Grant

 

I think Sheldon and Andrew both are right. You have to check your user and 
content of the site.

Here is the best example of the site which look nicely in different devices. 
http://www.kingshillcars.com/

 

You have to study your site material how you want to show the site.

 

Regards

Birendra

 

From: li...@webstandardsgroup.org [mailto:li...@webstandardsgroup.org] On 
Behalf Of grant_malcolm_bai...@westnet.com.au
Sent: Wednesday, May 16, 2012 8:13 AM
To: wsg@webstandardsgroup.org
Subject: [WSG] Mobile sites

 

Hello,

I was wondering whether having a dedicated mobile site represents an 
improvement with regard to accessibility and standards, or whether it is 
acceptable to have a single site that is adaptable to different screen widths 
(e.g. by means of CSS media queries). Of course, setting up a separate mobile 
site requires additional work and therefore expense.

I would be grateful for comments.

Thank you and regards,

Grant Bailey


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Re: [WSG] Mobile sites

[Andrew Harris]

yep, plenty of division ;-)

...but while Sheldon is correct that responsive design can cater quite
well to the most popular mobile devices, there are still a heap out
there that don't recognise media queries or any of the other building
blocks of responsive design. In some parts of the world these more
basic handests dominate internet traffic. If you're targeting the
affluent, western middle class, then you'll probably do alright, but
there are plenty of countries where more basic handsets still reign.

Your specific question, however, was about Accessibility and
Standards. While Standards can be perfectly catered for by a
responsive design, I'm not so sure about Accessibility. Certainly, the
technical aspects of Accessibility can, but there's a wooly area of
Accessibility regarding perceivability that sites can run foul of if
the text and interactions aren't built specifically for mobile. The
most common problem is simply too much text, but there are also issues
around context and mobility that can be better catered for by a
specifically designed mobile site. Probably the best example of this
is a bank or an airline - it's well worth creating a specific site in
their case, because a 'mobile' user quite likely has different needs
and priorities to the desktop user.

It's been said before, but it's more relevant than ever: Know your audience.

It's definitely not for everyone, but if your audience is large, and
your content complex, I think it's worth taking a tiered approach - a
small, dedicated mobile site for the top handful of suitable
interactions; responsive design for the vast majority of adaptable
content; alternative fallback versions for 'difficult' content. In
fact, there's a tier above the dedicated site - the stand alone app -
but that's another argument altogether :-)

And while I've been rabbiting on writing this email Enid has come back
and made a similar point far more economically than I.

-- 
Andrew Harris
and...@woowoowoo.com
http://www.woowoowoo.com

~~~ <*>< ~~~


On 16 May 2012 13:12, Doc2626  wrote:
> Grant, I think it's likely that you'll find a lot of division on this
> question. But I'll go ahead and offer my own opinion.
>
> I think it's an unnecessary expense and expenditure of energy to build a
> redundant site simply to suit mobile devices. There is a very workable
> solution using HTML5+CSS3, where a single site design can display quite
> satisfactorily on anything down to a 320px iPhone. Accessibility and
> usability needn't suffer in the process. If properly implemented, the user
> experience can maintain quality across all platforms.
>
> Additionally, if you're not enthusiastic about HTML5+CSS3, you can
> accomplish the same thing using XHTML+RDFa. In fact, since RDFa presently
> enjoys a bit more adoption than HTML5, the SEO benefits can be even greater.
>
> If you're interested, I recently posted a very brief explanation of the
> HTML5+CSS3 technique and will soon be posting a similar item on the RDFa
> option.
>
> Sheldon Campbell
>
> From: grant_malcolm_bai...@westnet.com.au
> Sent: Tuesday, May 15, 2012 7:43 PM
> To: wsg@webstandardsgroup.org
> Subject: [WSG] Mobile sites
>
> Hello,
>
> I was wondering whether having a dedicated mobile site represents an
> improvement with regard to accessibility and standards, or whether it is
> acceptable to have a single site that is adaptable to different screen
> widths (e.g. by means of CSS media queries). Of course, setting up a
> separate mobile site requires additional work and therefore expense.
>
> I would be grateful for comments.
>
> Thank you and regards,
>
> Grant Bailey
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> List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm
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RE: [WSG] Mobile sites [SEC=UNOFFICIAL]

[Enid Bulman]

UNOFFICIAL
Hi Grant,

My thoughts on this are (assuming you're rebuilding an existing site):

Check your site statistics/analytics - look at the range of devices accessing 
the site and what they're looking at - are there some pieces of content which 
aren't being accessed from handheld devices? If you're seeing a consistent 
spread of mobile access then, unless your site is going to chew up their 
bandwidth, you should be fine with a responsive design. If you're seeing that 
only a small subset of your site is getting mobile hits then you could look at 
streamlining this into a specific mobile site with its own navigation.


Enid Bulman MIT | Web Project Officer
Election & External Communication Section | Education & Communications Branch
Australian Electoral Commission
T: (02) 6271 4486 | M: 0411 244 521 | F: (02) 6271 4558

[cid:image001.gif@01CD3366.90E54E00]

[cid:image002.gif@01CD3366.90E54E00]



UNOFFICIAL
From: li...@webstandardsgroup.org [mailto:li...@webstandardsgroup.org] On 
Behalf Of grant_malcolm_bai...@westnet.com.au
Sent: Wednesday, 16 May 2012 12:43 PM
To: wsg@webstandardsgroup.org
Subject: [WSG] Mobile sites

Hello,

I was wondering whether having a dedicated mobile site represents an 
improvement with regard to accessibility and standards, or whether it is 
acceptable to have a single site that is adaptable to different screen widths 
(e.g. by means of CSS media queries). Of course, setting up a separate mobile 
site requires additional work and therefore expense.

I would be grateful for comments.

Thank you and regards,

Grant Bailey

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<><>

Re: [WSG] Mobile sites

[Doc2626]

Grant, I think it's likely that you'll find a lot of division on this question. 
But I'll go ahead and offer my own opinion.

I think it's an unnecessary expense and expenditure of energy to build a 
redundant site simply to suit mobile devices. There is a very workable solution 
using HTML5+CSS3, where a single site design can display quite satisfactorily 
on anything down to a 320px iPhone. Accessibility and usability needn't suffer 
in the process. If properly implemented, the user experience can maintain 
quality across all platforms.

Additionally, if you're not enthusiastic about HTML5+CSS3, you can accomplish 
the same thing using XHTML+RDFa. In fact, since RDFa presently enjoys a bit 
more adoption than HTML5, the SEO benefits can be even greater.

If you're interested, I recently posted a very brief explanation of the 
HTML5+CSS3 technique and will soon be posting a similar item on the RDFa option.

Sheldon Campbell


From: grant_malcolm_bai...@westnet.com.au 
Sent: Tuesday, May 15, 2012 7:43 PM
To: wsg@webstandardsgroup.org 
Subject: [WSG] Mobile sites


Hello,

I was wondering whether having a dedicated mobile site represents an 
improvement with regard to accessibility and standards, or whether it is 
acceptable to have a single site that is adaptable to different screen widths 
(e.g. by means of CSS media queries). Of course, setting up a separate mobile 
site requires additional work and therefore expense.

I would be grateful for comments.

Thank you and regards,

Grant Bailey 
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