Mobile Web Content and Apps

This guidance is designed to improve the person’s experience when accessing web content from mobile devices. The following best practice guidelines have been developed by W3C to ensure web content is usable with mobile web devices:

• People should be able to access content on a range of devices, regardless of differences in presentation capabilities and methods of access.
• Only provide basic navigation at the top of the page.
• Make use of the mobile device’s features and strengths to provide a better customer experience.
• Assign access keys to the most commonly used functions.
• Do not cause pop-ups or other windows to appear and do not change the current window without informing the person.
• Divide pages into usable but limited sized sections.
• Make sure that the overall size of page is suitable to the memory capacity of the device.
• Do not use images that cannot be displayed by some devices. Avoid large or high-resolution images except where important information would otherwise be lost.
• Make sure that information presented with colour is also available without colour.
• Ensure that text and background colour combinations provide good contrast.
• Do not use tables unless devices are known to support them. Tabular data can be challenging even for a skilled screen reader user. It is important that data presented in graphs and charts is also available in a text format. Keep tables as simple as possible, and ensure that they are properly marked up.
• Send content in a format that is known to be supported by the majority of devices. Use style sheets to control layout and presentation, unless the device is known not to support them.
• Provide informative error messages and a means of navigating away from an error message back to useful information.