Useful links: accessibility mistakes, WAVE in Dreamweaver, countdown to mobile, Gartner predictions, ePub for Web Designers

Common Accessibility Mistakes at Visual Twenty-Eight is a good checklist of things to make sure you aren’t doing.

WAVE Dreamweaver Extension is just out from WebAIM. It’s in beta, and there are some limitations at the moment. Now you can get a WAVE report on your page right in Dreamweaver. Super!

Gartner forecast

The road to 2013: A timeline for newspapers at RJI Mobile Blog talks about Gartner’s forecast that “By 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide.” Donald Reynolds, the RJI Mobile blogger, says:

This is a killer deadline — within 35 months the whole newspaper industry needs to move its emphasis from the static Web to the mobile Web.  From 17-inch displays to 3-inch displays.  From full keyboard and mouse to one-handed navigation.  And you can’t really wait until the deal is done if you want to be a major player in technology.  If Gartner’s prediction is accurate, newspapers really have just 18-24 months to position themselves as the leading news content provider for mobile platforms.

I look at a statement like that and my educator background kicks in with questions like

• Are we teaching web design students enough about making mobile-ready content?
• Are there enough trained developers in the industry who can create an effective mobile site?
• What should educators be doing with curriculum when faced with trends like this?

The entire set of predictions by Gartner are relevant to educators.  Here are just a few:

• By 2012, India-centric IT services companies will represent 20 percent of the leading cloud aggregators in the market (through cloud service offerings).
• By 2014, most IT business cases will include carbon remediation costs.
• Internet marketing will be regulated by 2015, controlling more than $250 billion in Internet marketing spending worldwide.
• By 2014, over 3 billion of the world’s adult population will be able to transact electronically via mobile or Internet technology.

The full report from Gartner Predicts 2010 is available from Gartner.

ePub

What Web Designers need to know about ePub from Nimbupani Designs explains what ePub is:

EPUB is a collection of 3 specifications:

• Open Publication Structure (OPS) 2.0, defines what formats are allowed to be used for the content (e.g. XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2).
• Open Packaging Format (OPF) 2.0, describes metadata, and structure of the .epub file in XML
• OEBPS Container Format (OCF) 1., specifies the directory structure of the EPUB ZIP archive.

This looks like an opportunity for a web designer who knows how to create effective document structure and formatting, or as Nimbupani says,

Most e-books today are created by automated tools which are, at best, tag soup generators with no concern for design. My guess is publishers who consistently output great e-book designs would do much better in the marketplace.