Re: Touch with Assistive Technology

On 24/04/2017 02:15, Gregg C Vanderheiden wrote:

>> In 2008 mobile sites were often separate and had links to desktop
>> sites.  That is no longer the case.
>
> If there is ONLY a mobile version — then it would be the only version
> and would have to conform - no?
[...]
 > I think maybe the company can make a claim on the desktop version - and
 > not on the mobile version.   It is then up to regulators to decide if
 > both need to be accessible.  I don’t think a desktop should be deemed
 > inaccessible if there is also a mobile that is not.

To add some complexity to this discussion, I'd also add that nowadays, 
there's often no hard "version" differentiation. There's a single 
site/page, which - depending on various factors such as the size of the 
user's browser/viewport, whether the viewport is portrait or landscape 
ratio, the presence of certain APIs, and assumptions made by developers 
such as "if it's small screen, then it's likely a touch-only mobile" etc 
- is presented / functions in potentially completely different ways.

And yes, I *will* once again reiterate that of course we can use the 
shorthand of "mobile version", but all that really means for responsive 
sites is "small-screen version", as mobile versions can and will trigger 
on "desktop" if the browser window is small enough or zoomed-in enough.

So while the company/developers may say "this is our desktop version and 
this is our mobile version", the reality is that there's a fluid 
continuum here where the "mobile" version will also come into effect on 
desktop under certain not uncommon conditions, and vice-versa on 
large-enough tablet/phablet type devices the "desktop" version will be 
shown instead. Which is why - unless a site really does use something 
like a user agent sniffing strategy to then show different actual 
versions of a page depending on its best guess about what 
device/browser/OS the user has - it'd be difficult to make any hard 
distinction between "our desktop version is accessible, but our mobile 
version isn't".

P
-- 
Patrick H. Lauke

www.splintered.co.uk | https://github.com/patrickhlauke
http://flickr.com/photos/redux/ | http://redux.deviantart.com
twitter: @patrick_h_lauke | skype: patrick_h_lauke

Received on Monday, 24 April 2017 08:10:02 UTC