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, [email protected] 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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