Access Ability: Convergence of Mobile Technology and Universal Design

Hal Meeks

Presented at SITE 3/2004

Our model for information delivery is the personal computer. It has a screen, a keyboard and a mouse, We operate it via a user interface that gives us a graphical metaphor that is tenously abstracted from the inner workings of the computer itself. The user metaphor for operation of a computer has a strong visual component that allows us to accomplish many tasks quickly. As Douglas Englebart visualized in the early 1960's,  we operate using symbols that contain complex instructions that are interconnected. Computers are "intelligence amplifiers" in an imperfect way.

Unfortunately, this also means that content we create for this environment can be shaped by the environment. Edward Tufte's treatment of PowerPoint as a cognitive style illustrates how PowerPoint's inherent structuring of information can affect the integrity of the message, potentially fragmenting and burying facts. PowerPoint itself is a tool that is specifically designed to create content that is viewed a certain way, linear, nested "bullets" of information. This specificity of outcome is trade-off we make if we use Powerpoint to create content. We would never use PowerPoint to write an essay, as an example. We would use a word processor or text editor. It has a tool set more appropriate to writing in a linear, continous style.

Tools sometimes define the types of content that we create. Since we develop our content on a personal computer, we often define that as our principle platform for viewing such content.

Accessibility has, for some, required a reassessment of this fixture on a specific way of viewing content. The legal aspects of accessibility are well beyond the scope of this brief paper. The aspect of accessiblity that is of most importance in this instance is it's impact on how we view content that is stored on a computer, and how it can be utilized

Accessibility is often associated with accommodation of the special needs of a specific group of individuals that have limitations of their senses (visually, aurally) or motor skills, based on what is considered the "norm". This is an unfortunate situation, as it masks the more profound aspects of the term "accessibility". Breaking accessibility up into two words, access ability, exposes a fundamental aspect of the term. It is the ability to access. In this case, access information.

There are three aspects to accessibility:.

Accessing content is something that we in the alleged "norm" take for granted, until we try to access a particularly troublesome web page with the wrong browser, much less the wrong device. We need to acknowledge that the concept of information being bound to a certain way of consuming it is being challenged not only by the needs of the visually impaired, but by a whole host of devices that allow us to flow content from one way of viewing content to another.

Handheld computing devices have been available for a long time. Apple's landmark Newton was never an extremely popular device, but it's progeny, the Palm Pilot, caught on quickly. Even it is now old hat, as a generation of color cell phones with built-in cameras flood the market.

Early prototypes of the Palm Pilot were carved out of a piece of wood, about the size of a deck of cards. The device's chief developer, Jeff Hawkins, carried this block of wood around in his shirt pocket. From this experience he was able to define a specific role for the device. It is not a replacement for a laptop or desktop computer. It's screen size is limited by the form factor, which is in turn defined as the size of a shirt pocket.

These severe size limitations do put much constraint on the types of content that can be used on this device. However, it's limitations are also enabling. It's small size makes it more likely that it will be carried, and used. With it's ability to be carried easily, comes the ability to utilize content in ways that content creators have not anticipated.

The World Wide Web Consortium's online guide to creating Accessible Content uses the term "graceful transformation" to describe content that can be enjoyed by users regardless of whether they are labelled as disabled or not. Accessibility is not simply addressing the needs of a specific set of users with identifiable disabilities, it is addressing a very real future need where browser specific/device specific content is going to be quite problematic.

As a case in point, Jakob Nielsen's web site UseIt.com was designed on computers with keyboards, mice and displays, but was consructed to meet the guidelines for Accessibility. It works well via speech synthesis, and other traditional technologies used by the visually impaired, the aurally impaired, cognitively impaired, and so on. However, it also works quite well with the limited resolution of a cell phone. It is at once an example of useable design driving content organization, but it is also refreshing, in a time when it is common to experience difficulties with web pages with specific browser dependencies, or plug in dependencies. which simply do not work on small, mobile devices.

The  W3C does include language that embraces a variety of alternate display technologies:

When we think of html content as the driving force of the internet, we are defining the internet in the context of a specific way of utilizing it. A Web browser is a viewer application for specific forms of content. However, as we move forward to a range of devices that can utilize a variety of content, including html, but do not use a web browser such as Internet Explorer, Netscape, Opera, Safari, Lynx and so on, we need to concern ourselves with the critical idea that content should flow, or to use the WWW3's terminology, "gracefully transform".

AvantGo is at first glance a simple web browser for the Palm, PocketPC and some cell phones. However, it's real value is not in the software that runs on the device itself, but on the server software that can transform web content to be useable on a handheld. It is no coincidence that AvantGo's own guidelines for authoring content for their service mirrors the same general advice that one would follow for building Accessible content. The other key feature that makes AvantGo interesting is the concept of channels and subscriptions.

AvantGo users subscribe to "channels" that point to specific web content. This content is either content that has been specifically authored for their service, but can also be "generally useable" web content that is filtered and transformed by their server technology. Once a user subscribes to a channel, they need to do nothing else but periodically connect to the AvantGo server to receive new content. This allows users to carry content originally created for the web with them, since it has been (up to the advent of cell phones with enough capabilities to render web content) an implicit assumption that handheld users do not have ubiquitous access to the internet. With AvantGo they can download content from the web, and view it, unconnected, on their handheld device.

While AvantGo is an interesting technology, it is tied to a specific software and delivery mechanism that is owned by one company. There are other examples of technology that combines the familiar with the new, such as RSS.  RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication". It is a fairly simple XML-based model for publishing content in a way that is not browser or viewer specific. It was designed around the concept of "channels", which at their simplest, define the title, date of publication, summary of content, and follow through link for a full article. It was originally conceived by Netscape as a simple way for authors to develop content that would work inside a Portal framework. However, it has taken hold as a way for authors to create date sensitive content that can be published easily, and can then read by users using software called an "RSS aggregator".

RSS in one way mirrors AvantGo's publishing model, but it also points to a future of content creation and publication that is even more device/software non-specific than AvantGo. Ultimately, AvantGo channels end up being viewed inside AvantGo's (or it's open source analog, Plucker) viewer. RSS based content can be displayed in innumerable different ways. There are RSS aggregators that work as a server component, where users need nothing more than a web browser to view RSS channels, or it can work with a specific desktop/handheld/cellphone/device not ßyet invented application. It is simply a framework for storing and describing information, not a weighty model for all content creation needs. As a result, it is widely used.

RSS is typically tied to another internet publishing phenomena, the weblog (or it's abbreviation, blog). Most readers should already be familiar with webblogs, but it important to note that most (but not all) weblogs are heavily text based, which allows them to be potentially Accessible as well. Webblog authors are not necessarily concerned about specifically creating content that is Accessible, but they are certainly concerned that their content can be read. To add to the shift in perspective, there are several blog services that are designed with the intent of content creation and publication from a mobile device,  such as TextAmerica and HipTop's (a mobile device manufacturer) blog service. This should be a fair warning to those that believe that the standard model for creating and viewing web based content is a personal computer. Things are beginning to change.

Accessibility will indeed be a critical issue in years to come, as our technological assumptions shift. We never anticipated that cell phones would become a content delivery environment, much less an authoring environment, but that is certainly what is happening. Our assumptions about content creation should be vigorously challenged. Content creators struggle with mundane issues such as browser compatibility, but there is a larger, more encompassing challenge facing us in the immediate future. The desktop computer is not the only device that we will use to utilize content. We really have only an inkling of what may come next; emergence of voice powered content (VoiceXML), dynamic publishing models that can adapt content on the fly for context and delivery, and much more. Accessible guidelines should not be approached as a "must do" from a legal aspect; they should be approached as a way to future-proof content. The future cannot be retrofitted.

Web Content Cited in this Article:

Jakob Nielson. UseIt.com. Available at: http://www.useit.com

Corporate Design Foundation. Title: "Beyond TechnoGadget". Available at: http://www.cdf.org/palm/palm.html

Bootstrap Institute. Englebart, Douglas. Title: "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework". Available at: http://www.bootstrap.org/augdocs/friedewald030402/augmentinghumanintellect/ahi62index.html

Hiptop Blog Service. Available at: http://www.hiptop.com/hiplog/

TextAmerica's Blog Service. Available at: http://www.textamerica.com/

AvantGo. Available at: http://www.avantgo.com

W3C. Web Accessibility Initiative. Available at: http://www.w3.org/WAI/

Publications mentioned in this Article:

Tufte, Edward R. (September 2003), The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. Graphics Press LLC, Cheshire, Connecticut

Other Recommended Reading:

You may also want to look at my presentation outlines on content creation for handheld devices.One is on html content creation, the other is focused on streaming media creation.

There to Here: Mobile Content Creation. Available at: http://www.ncsu.edu/mobile/theretohere.html

Video A Go Go: Creating Mobile Content for Handhelds. Available at: http://www.ncsu.edu/it/multimedia/mobilemm.html