RE: accessible sites in i-mode

Hi Ineke,


    | Can you tell me how accessible is a site in i-mode?
    | 


Depends on what you mean by accessible, but hope this is useful:
http://snipurl.com/imode_sites ...I guess you are beyond this stage
already though. 


    | I-mode does not recognize (nested) tables and frames.  
    | The mobile phone  in which I looked  at my sites,  could 
    | not recognize tables at all.


You shouldn't need to rely on tables anyway. Different i-mode phones
have different sizes (http://snipurl.com/imode_sizes) , so a simple
listing of your information is ideal -- so that words wrap according to
the screen size. Users are used to scrolling up and down. 

What you might consider important is to assign "Access Keys"
(http://snipurl.com/imode_accesskey) to your most important links so
that users can press numbers on the phone to navigate around your imode
website. 



    | How can I make the so called emojis accessible? And how 
    | to change their default colours when I don't want to use 
    | the font-element and CSS can not be used?


Again, I don't know what you mean by making emojis
(http://snipurl.com/imode_emojis) accessible?  The availability of both
CSS and fonts on different devices will vary (some of the recent FOMA
phones support color for instance but most of them don't even with a
FONT tag) so if you want a consistent look, stick to the basics. An
orange beer mug icon is not too different from a black one -- both
convey the same emotion. I am sure you know how to use emojis, but this
is an example: 

  <a href="login.htm">&#63869;</a>

This will show up on a phone screen as a key icon, with a link to
login.htm. Is that "accessible" given that it is a key icon (indicating
some sort of lock, i.e., security/login) and is clickable to take user
to login.htm? 



    | I hope anybody has already experience with accessible 
    | sites in i-mode.


Yes, but we kept it simple. I guess that is what accessible is. Lots of
access keys and familiar emojis so that users feel comfortable with the
interface. Most frequently used links were at the top of a page so that
apart from access buttons, even the scrolling was minimized. 

Btw, if you work with cHTML tags list (http://snipurl.com/chtml_tags,
for e.g.) they might not be entirely accurate, so get your list from
NTTDoCoMo. For development, either use actual a-mode devices or get an
emulator that understands i-mode, not the usual ones which basically
show you a small browser window. I think this one is neat:
http://www.x-9.com/mimic/. 

Hope this rant is useful in some way. I wonder.

-Shanx



--
Ships are safe inside the harbour, 
but is that what ships are for? 

Shashank Tripathi
www.shanx.com
shanx@shanx.com

Received on Friday, 12 July 2002 14:37:14 UTC