Don’t call me DOM

I will be talking next week at the first AEGIS conference in Seville, on the relationships between the mobile Web and accessibility.

I was asked to contribute a paper to include in the proceedings of the conference, and while the proceedings haven’t been published yet, I’ve just published an HTML version of that paper.

The paper starts with reminding of the similarities between mobile Web access and accessibility in terms of requirements, and compares the W3C best practices and guidelines in these domains, building up from the work the Web Accessibility Initiative and the Mobile Web Initiative did over the past years.

It also highlights the concrete differences in the way the two domains are usually approached; in particular, while accessibility is often pushed to be integrated into the main Web site, mobile Web users often benefit from dedicated optimized Web sites.

The newest contribution of that paper probably lies in the last part, in the analysis of the synergies between improving the Web for mobile users and for persons with disabilities, and in particular how mobile Web applications can play a special role for an always more inclusive and rich Web experience.

Comments and thoughts on that hypothesis, and on the paper on general, would be very welcome.