RE: People with disabilities using mobile devices to interact with the Web

David Woolley wrote:
> John Foliot - Stanford Online Accessibility Program wrote:
> 
> [ Apple authoring guidelines for iPhone ]
> 
>> <link media="only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)"
>> 			href="small-device.css" type="text/css"
> 
> That tends to confirm my hypothesis that designers will only detect
> based on screen size, not on device class.

*SOME* designers perhaps, but to generally imply *all* would be unfair and
unsubstantiated.  I also personally see a distinction between designers and
developers.

> Apple's marketing claim, here, will be that they have created a
> handheld browser that does WYSIWYG for mainstream web content and
> therefore, given the exclusions in the original question, that this
> thread is irrelevant to iPhone.  Like most marketing positions, one
> probably needs to avoid taking it at face value.

Well, first off, I think your conclusion is a bit of a stretch. iPhone uses
the Safari/WebKit based browser, which by-and-large does a decent job with
web standards.  Apple have taken a decision (rightly or wrongly) to use the
CSS 3 media query rather than support the hand-held CSS type, because, as
they state: "iPhone ignores the print and handheld media queries because
these types do not supply high-end content."  In their defense, they *are*
using a W3C approved method.  As well, they simply suggest that this is a
method to "optimize" for their hand-held implementation: the Safari browser
on iPhone will render a web page not optimized just as easily, although the
text size may be too small to start to be functionally usable - at which
point the page *can* be zoomed by the user to correct that deficiency.

Finally, the question originally posed was about the current support of
hand-held style sheet, to which a direct response with supplemental info was
supplied regarding one major device - relevant to many on this list curious
about this topic: by optimizing your content for this hand-held you may in
fact be improving cognition for many users - certainly within WAI interest
boundaries.

JF

Received on Saturday, 7 June 2008 22:53:00 UTC