Responsive Web Design and Accessibility for Mobile Devices

Running head: RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGN
Responsive web design
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Accessibility feature of mobile web design (for phone or tablet)
Introduction:
Accessibility of mobile refers to process of making applications as well as websites more
accessible to disabled people. The basic objective of web is that is must be designed in such a
manner so that it can work for everyone irrespective of their ability, language, location, software,
hardware. When this objective of web is fulfilled, then it is accessible to people with a various
range of sight, hearing, movement and cognitive ability. Thus, the effect of disability has entirely
changed the web as the web removes the communication and interaction hurdles that many
people encounter in the real world. However, barriers that exclude people from accessing web
are created due to improper design of technologies, tools, applications and websites (Persson et
al., 2015).
Accessibility is extremely vital for developers and organizations that intend to develop
web tools and websites of high quality and do not want to exclude people from using their
services and products. The aim of web accessibility is to make the web accessible to its full
potential and enable equal participation of disabled people on the web. Thus the web should be
accessible to people with various abilities in order to avail them equal opportunity and equal
access. Indeed, the United Nation convention on the rights of disabled people identifies access to
web as a fundamental human right (Henry, Abou-Zahra & Brewer, 2014).
Web accessibility:
It refers to design and development of tools, technologies and websites that can be
accessible by disabled people so that they can contribute to the web by perceiving,
understanding, navigating and interacting with the web. Web accessibility involves all
disabilities that affect web access including visual, speech, auditory, physical, cognitive and

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neurological. The web provides exceptional access to information as well as interaction to
disabled people, which means that web technologies could overcome the accessibility hurdles to
print, visual and audio media. Besides supporting social inclusion of disabled people
accessibility, support the same for older people and people in rural areas (Díaz-Bossini &
Moreno, 2014).
Role of responsive web design in web accessibility:
Accessibility overlaps with practice such as mobile web design. The web design has
significant role in accessibility of website. For instance, avoiding of colour schemes that makes
things difficult to understand for colour-blind and short-sighted people. The objective of a
responsive design or layout is to work well on every device irrespective of its resolution or
screen size. While designing any application or tool or website, the developer must consider the
types of accessibility problem that, the application, tool, or website will support. For instance,
one general accessibility issue is that users who do not use mouse for browsing internet. In that
case, the developer needs to create the keyboard shortcuts for those users so that they can
exclusively browse the website or access the application or tool with their keyboard. The things
needs to be considered for building a responsive as well as accessible website are typographic
contrast, providing enough white space, grids and columns, navigation behaviour, dynamic
features such as images sliders, videos (Hara, Le & Froehlich, 2013).
Responsive web design is the approach of website design and development that works as
fine in a tablet or mobile phone as in desktop or other screen size. Irrespective of the way the
user accesses the website, the website features and elements rearrange themselves to make the
website presentation layout fit at the size of the device screen (Kim, 2013).