jebsblog

As a web designer with some high mileage on the odometer, I can scornfully remember the days of ole when the “browser wars” forced us to add all kinds of goofy code to make our web designs appear consistent – let alone appear at all – on various browsers and browser versions. There are still some designers out there who fuss about making their sites work on IE6. I say, let them eat cake!

But I have been watching the development of many of the new hand-held technologies and realizing that the time is coming when more people will be viewing websites on small 2-3 inch screens than on the 27-inch monster like the one I have on my desk. In fact, there is some evidence that day has already come.

I have prescribed for some time that the solution to all this was good coding – and by that I mean standards-based , universally-designed coding. My rationale has been that the new devices and their tiny browsers would eventually regress to the mean and adopt the W3C standards. This is turn would allow for an “efficient” transition from the big screen to the small.

With my purchase of an iPod Touch last spring and a Garmin GPS several months earlier, I have recognized that simply making a website that looks okay on the small screen is less than ideal. These small devices are much more interested in your content, not how it is displayed on the screen. When I access web content on my tiny Safari screen, I want to be able to read it clearly and navigate to the things I want. I don’t care about your “pretty pictures” and fancy Flash animation. In fact, I can’t even see your Flash!

Over the past month, I have started noticing certain blogs that, when I access them with my iPod, magically appear as though they were built inside an iPod/iPhone apps. The look, feel, buttons and controls familiar to iPod/iPhone users are all there and, more importantly, work. The first of these I notices was my local NBC affiliate WCSH-6 TV in Portland, Maine. A couple of months ago they introduced a new iPod/iPhone-friendly interface that appears when one accessed their website with a hand-held device (you can still access the “full site” by activating a button at the bottom of the screen). The effect was stunning to say the least, and joyous in that I no longer has to resize the screen repeatedly to read the content. I needed to get me one of those!

This morning I found a blogger who had a similar iPod-enhanced Word Press blog site and at the bottom I found the magic word WPtouch. A few minutes later my jebswebs blog was sporting the new look and I must say, I am very impressed.

The WPtouch Mobile Plugin by the BraveNewCode folks is an easy-to-install script that loads in seconds. Once activated, the settings page gives you all kinds of options and choices. And, once installed, my WordPress blog site instantaneously looks like it was built into an iPod app. Tres cool.

At this point, WPtouch is all I could ask for and more. But, I suspect that as time goes on, I will want more. Maybe a similar plugin for my Joomla! and Drupal sites! Maybe they already exist.

Gotta go, I feel quest coming on.

Last word, if you are looking for a great plugin that makes your WordPress blog look great on a mobile device, check out the WPtouch Mobile Plugin!

~j

For the past several months I have been the proud owner of an Apple iPod Touch. As you know from reading this blog, I am far from being an “applefanboi” and have tended towards the “I’m a PC” side of things. But I have been dutifully impressed by this device and the technology behind it.

Perhaps what has impressed me most is the “touch screen” that is the main user interface. Like the move from the keyboard to the mouse – which Apple also perfected more than 25 years ago – the touch screen, I believe, is the way we will interact with computers in the future. I probably should expand that to include the fantastical 3D user interface that Tom Cruise’s character used in The Minority Report even though in that futuristic fantasy the interaction is between hands and holograms as opposed to actually touching a screen. But the concepts are the same – a more direct connection between human physical movement and the actions of a computer.

I think what I like best about the touch screen is how, almost intuitively (and I hate to even admit this), I was able to navigate the device. Being the typical red-blooded-American-male, I didn’t bother to read the directions until after I had given the device a good spin. I found it easy to navigate and move between apps and generally work the browser. The less intuitive stuff related to moving the badges around on the home screen or how to remove them from the device (I still don’t know how to do that on the Mac OS), I had to study to learn. But even these make sense if you think of it (unlike ejecting a CD by dragging it to the trash can – huh?).

The movement of dragging documents around on the screen to view them, squeezing and stretching them to zoom in and out and even the “flick of the finger” action of moving between pages is very close to the “feel” of hands and paper.

Well, it seems everyone has gotten into the “touch screen act” these days and yes things are getting ratcheted up dramatically with the recent release of the new Palm Pre – another touch screen dependent smart phone - in addition to the pending release of the Apple iPhone 3G S. Add to this is Microsoft’s announcement that touch screen capacity has been added into Window 7 (additional hardware required), and it is pretty clear that within a couple of years we will see more and more people engaging their technology “by touch” rather than using a clunky piece of hardware like a mouse or keyboard. Or will we?

Of course all of this creates many new challenges for people with disabilities. How does this new technology work with people who cannot see?

I am sensing that solutions to some of these issues may already be on the drawing board – well at the very least, on Apple’s drawing board. We’ll have to wait and see if the solutions become widespread.

Apple’s solution is the inclusion of the native VoiceOver screenreader into the new iPhone O/S. By the way, I was a little miffed by Apple’s insistence that the iPhone O/S is actually a version of Mac O/S X – bit of stretch if you ask me, Cupertino.

In addition to VoiceOver – which at this point apparently only works with the iPhone’s Safari browser and “native” apps – the new iPhone has Voice Control which will make dialing calls, choosing music and even announcing music titles accessible to people with visual impairments. As demonstrated, Voice Control is a universally designed feature which give heads-up control to all users and allows those who cannot see the device better ability to engage it.

But the clincher may come with the issue of the touch keyboard. If people who are blind or have visual impairments want to use the iPhone 3G S to send text messages or otherwise input text into the device, they are going to have to learn how to “touch type” in a whole new way. And the success of that remains to be seen – sorry no pun intended.

Of course, the next iteration of the iPhone (4G?) might have voice-to-text built in, but since we haven’t mastered that on desktop computers, it might not be that soon. But those Apple people are crafty.

It’s only been 48 hours since Apple made their big announcements at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference – WWDC (which I affectionately have referred to as the “Apple-Love-In”). It is clearly too early to gauge how this new iPhone will work with folks with disabilities. So, I am waiting patiently for the final verdict from my screenreading colleagues who just can’t wait to get their hands on the new toys when they are release to the public next week. I am assuming that Apple live tested these new accessibility features extensively before now – at least I hope they have – but I want to hear from my friends about what they really think about these tools when the phone is released and in the hands of real users.

So to answer my own question, it is pretty apparent that touch screens are the next big thing in personal technology, but maybe just a temporary thing.

Your thoughts?

~j