Devices Have Disabilities Too

The Australian brings news of the growing battle for mobile banking leadership among Australian banks:

Brisbane-based Suncorp launched the first mobile browser-based banking service and last week made it compatible with iPhone and Google Android handsets.

The Commonwealth Bank has similarly updated its mobile service, which will work on any internet-enabled mobile phone, and has additional functionality for the iPhone.

People have been talking about the coming mobile revolution for a long time. In fact, as the article mentions, the Commonwealth Bank had previously tried to jump on the mobile banking wagon as early as 1999 via a WAP interface. So what’s changed and what does this have to do with accessibility?

1. The capabilities and affordability of mobile phones with Internet access has dramatically improved. Firstly with the iPhone and now a top-notch browser is a must have feature in a smart phone.
2. WAP is out, users want the real web. It’s not ok to provide a text only WAP interface that works on phones, users want the full functionality and they want it to look pretty too. Modern phones support HTML, CSS and JavaScript and most of the time you should be writing just one site that works everywhere rather than a separate mobile site.

It’s that second point that really brings accessibility in. If you design your site so that it can be used with a range of disabilities, there’s a much better chance that it will also work on devices with a range of capabilities. In other words, someone using an iPhone to view the site is just a user with a particular type of disability.

• They have a small screen so the site needs to scale properly (use relative units, not absolute). If your site can handle users changing the size of the font, it can probably scale pretty well to fit on an iPhone.
• If the networks slow, they may not be able to see images. If you have good alt tags, they won’t need to.
• They can’t see flash. While you can design accessible flash, most people don’t so surfing without flash is often very similar to what a screen reader would see (at least for the flash side of things).
• They can’t use a keyboard very fast and can’t drag and drop anything.

There’s also plenty of unique things about various disabilities and the iPhone as well as different limitations on different handsets, but there’s also a lot of overlap.

Accessibility isn’t a cost centre – it’s a competitive advantage.