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Accessibility and Mobility and Web Development

Mobility and Accessibility are not new technologies that have come up. They are not extras that some of us need to tack on to what web developers do.

They are an essential part of web development and should be considered as basic skills.

Accessibility is not hard. It used to be, it really used to be, but with HTML5, it’s actually quite simple. Simply a small part of the HTML5 spec, something web developers should know. Mobility was a hot new topic 6+ years ago. Now it’s expected that the applications you build are in some way available on a mobile platform.

It is an expectation.

Why is this not the reality? Why are web developers still making applications the same way they were 10 years ago? It partly has to do with web development being a “full stack” profession for so long. Traditionally, the front end has been small and the back end has been “the application”. The direction of the web is putting more of the application on the front end, so developers that are considered full stack have to now know more than basic HTML and the minimal JavaScript it takes to do some validation. JavaScript has become huge, for large applications, it requires its own framework.

I don’t think that’s been adequately realized by the web development community yet. The future of the web is a partnership, where the applications are separate. the back end an API, the front end the “actual application” that gets the data it needs from the API. As such, people are turning more to micro frameworks for the back end, and away from what had become the staple Rails clones — and much further away from the even larger, more complex frameworks.

SPA-Architecture I’m not sure if Single Page Applications are truly “the” future. But they are the now. It is important to stay on top of this, as this industry is constantly changing. But one thing is for sure, if you’re a business fully invested in back end developers, you’re hitting a problem where you feel like you need to hire “UI specialists” when you really need either 1) for back end developers to beef up their front end development skills or 2) to hire developers focused on front end “development” (as opposed to graphic designers).

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Mobility Workshop

gold stick figures sitting together working on their gold laptopsA couple of months ago, we had a very successful presentation on vagrant/puppet. Given by a developer, it sparked motivation in some devops enthusiasts to give a workshop. It went really well. (Vagrant Tutorial)

They had a great format with their workshops that seemed effective. They were super enthusiastic, which translated to super prepared. They had created a wordpress post that was a very detailed, step by step instruction on getting started.

The interest and effectiveness of this sparked motivation to do “other topics”. So I put together this tutorial on mobile development, “featuring jQuery Mobile”.

I thought the idea of something where I had the material prepared beforehand and could just say “go” was a great place to start. This shouldn’t be a presentation, it should be an opportunity for people to get their hands dirty.

I was running through tutorials and found a lot of them had put their code on github. At some point I had the idea to use branches to “step” through the tutorial. The way I envisioned the workshop going was to start with nothing, and build out a mobile app through logical steps — as a lot of tutorials do. Do a header, do a menu, do a list, do a link, do a transition, do a search. Coming up with a list of “things to do” was easy.

Putting it together with github also meant I could just put the directions in the base readme and it would be a completely self-contained tutorial. (Not to mention, having it in git allowed me to force people who I know don’t want to make the switch out of SVN to use a VCS that is so much nicer.)

Anyway, the finished draft took a long time. It was a lot of easy stuff, but time consuming.

(Mobility Workshop)

The most important part came after the draft was finished. I gathered some team members and some cross-team members — basically whoever would come sit with me and had them run through it to see if it made sense. They were brutal. It was great. A lot of this work happened after hours, so the language was at times, very stream of consciousness. Having people with varied familiarity with the topics covered allowed for some invaluable revisions.

Overall, the workshop proved to be a wonderful exercise in collaboration and teamwork, and regardless of how the actual workshop goes, it has left me better than I started, so that’s good enough.

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