I’m a big fan of Miami Ink and although I’d never been sold on getting a tattoo myself I find the programme fascinating and some of the designs and art that the guys create are really amazing. Recently some of the team, Yoji, James, Darren and Chris, created Ruthless & Toothless which sells tattoo-art inspired clothing for kids, after not being able to find cool stuff for their own children. The designs are great and even better there are some other cool designs for laptops and phones. The iPhone covers are already giving me an itchy credit-card finger.

It struck me the other day both how mobile devices are likely to drive improvements in the usability and accessibility of sites, especially those that want to give their users a similar experience on mobile browser and web browser.

Hiding functionality of information behind hover states and using a bit of dodgy javascript as a way to trigger them has always been a no-no but finding a way to convince clients who feel it makes a page more exciting is often difficult. With the advent of touch-screen mobile devices we can now side-step the discussion completely – no hover state whatsoever – joy!

Also anyone who has tried using their mobile browser to look at sites which pack in links and functionality without a thought for space, then found their Homer Simpson fingers have no chance of finding their target without opening adverts or clicking the wrong buttons, I’m in your club. Hopefully over time sites will start to add the necessary space and think about which buttons sit next to which.

From an accessibility point of view, I can see some of the features of screen readers would be useful in mobile browser pages, particularly information heavy ones. Pulling up a list of links or a list of headings would really help getting an overview of a page which requires a lof of scrolling. Also quick hand movements of key-strokes to trigger shortcuts would make a big difference. I’ll be keeping my eye on advances in mobile browsers to see if anything like that makes an appearance.