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universal design for mobile
AT&T has gotten a lot of press this week talking about its universal design principles. It’s worth a read for anybody in mobile development, as is the training offered by both major sources for their definitions: North Carolina State University Center for Universal Design and the University of Wisconsin TRACE Center (I’ve had training both places).
I applaud AT&T’s new-found desire for universal design. Not only did I write about the business model in my book, Designing the Mobile User Experience, but I’ve written about different software and devices to improve mobile accessibility. When I was at Sprint, I managed to get a few improvements on a few devices. Not as many as I wanted, but a few improvements.
My concern with this announcement and this document is that they are targeting it at developers, who have very little influence over the accessibility of devices or web sites. For example, a device with a web browser that can not in any way read aloud the text can do nothing to facilitate mobile web use by blind users, regardless of how many accessibility principles the site employs. Similarly, a device with only 2 font sizes will have some issues with displaying text for folks with declining vision.
Nevertheless, increasing the visibility of the problem is worthwhile. Smart phone developers at least can come up with product improvements.
While the FierceWireless report said, “Developers must first submit applications created via Universal Design principles to AT&T for certification if they wish for the apps to be available on the operator’s Media Mall mobile site,” the press release did not indicate that would be required. I hope this remains true, because this would pretty much limit Media Mall to Symbian, Palm, and Windows Mobile applications. Not very accessible to feature phone users, now is it?
What I’d like to see is the various “smart phone” operating system providers helping out in similar ways. I think the impact would go further than the AT&T document. What I’d like to see AT&T do is buy feature phones with accessible features.
In the meantime, testing for accessibility is a variant on usability testing. If you want help with this, let us know.
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