The future is now

It may sound futuristic, but it’s happening now. The Web is being inundated with “mashups.” These applications combine data and content from more than one source into an aggregated user experience. Google Personalized Home Page is a good representative of a mashup because you can build a tailored page with Google Map, Travelocity, Currency Converter, and weather gadgets to compose a travel planning mashup. Zillow.com, the house “zestimate” site, combines real estate information with aerial maps.

Mashups are catching on across businesses because they provide development speed, flexibility, innovation and real-time problem solving. They create a “self-serve” environment where enterprises can assemble new applications instead of creating new ones. Mashups enable businesses to:

• Deliver more innovative, customer-focused applications by supporting end user application development.
• Improve productivity and collaboration by delivering situational applications.
• Quickly uncover new insights by easily assembling information from multiple sources.
• Solve problems by relying on bigger communities who contribute content and functionality.

For all of their promise, mashups introduce a number of accessibility and usability problems stemming from inaccessible services, inconsistent keyboard navigation and other issues. Aggregating content and data, or resources, from different sources creates numerous accessibility difficulties:

• Is the resource accessible?
• Will the accessible resource meet my users’ needs?
• Can the resource be adapted to fit my users’ needs?
• If the resource cannot meet these needs, is there an equivalent alternative?
• Will the mashup have consistent keyboard support?
• Is the end solution too cluttered to assist all users?
• Will restructuring the mashup produce a more usable solution?

Furthermore, when a mashup provider merges resources from various services, he or she cannot assume that those resources will produce an accessible solution that meets all user needs, even if those resources are accessible individually.

So, what is a mashup provider to do?

Learn about how IBM accessibility experts Peter Parente and Rich Schwerdtfeger are shaping the future of the Web by helping to make creating mashups easier so that people of all abilities can use them.

To summarize, for the long term, Parente and Schwerdtfeger make two recommendations. First, to address the accessibility of original resource content, the industry must:

• Continue to acknowledge and adopt emerging standards such as WAI-ARIA.
• Develop best practices for addressing accessibility issues that surface when merging data and content.
• Perform an accessibility study of data feeds (RSS, ATOM, others).
• Identify transformations needed (Fluid Project).

Second, the industry must develop and adopt a “flexible Internet highway infrastructure” in order to enable user preferences to be mapped with appropriate resources and adapt the resources where necessary.