Katherine Lynch.org

According to W3.org, the Mobile Web Best Practices (MWBP) Working Group and the Web Access Initiative (WAI) Education and Outreach Working Group yesterday released a final draft of "Relationship Between MWBP and WCAG."

This document is one of several new writings to come out of W3 regarding the mobile web and content accessibility standards.  As more and more mobile devices gain access to the interwebs, more standards arise. 

The Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 Guidelines came out as a recommendation in July 2008, providing the first real list of common problems with mobile-accessed sites, as well as what developers can do to avoid these problems. 

Not long after, the WAI published a document called "Web Content Accessibility and Mobile Web: Making a Web Site Accessible Both for People with Disabilities and for Mobile Devices," in which the hypothesis was stated that web accessibility problems for users with disabilities and web accessibility problems for mobile devices tend to overlap in many areas.  By learning about how to develop for one, meeting the standards of the other is suddenly much less daunting.

The draft serves as a last-chance piece of public review material before the draft's status moves to W3C Working Group Note.  Check it and its supporting documents out here:

• Web Content Accessibility and Mobile Web: Making a Web Site Accessible Both for People with Disabilities and for Mobile Devices - People are encouraged to read this one first
• Relationship between Mobile Web Best Practices (MWBP) and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
• Shared Web Experiences: Barriers Common to Mobile Device Users and People with Disabilities
• Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0