First Public Working Draft: WCAG 2.2

The Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AG WG) has published a First Public Working Draft of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2. WCAG provides recommendations for making web content more accessible to people with disabilities. It addresses accessibility of web content on desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile devices. Following these guidelines also makes your web content more usable to all users in a variety of situations. Please see the blog post for information on what’s new in this draft and upcoming work: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 in Development.

W3C awards Website Redesign Project to Studio 24

25 February 2020

The W3C Website redesign Request For Proposals has concluded with W3C awarding the project to Studio 24, a small, independent digital agency in the heart of Cambridge, UK, founded in 1999. The project covers a subset of the public-facing pages of our Website and will span the next 10 months. Please, read more in our joint press release.

We are aiming for this phase to scale well to cover the redesign expectations for the rest of the site. Future phases will include the Member and Team spaces, internal Work Groups homepages, specifications template, mailing lists archives, W3C Community Groups and Business Groups.

The current website was implemented ten years ago and is no longer as effective in supporting W3C’s mission and goals as it could be. We believe that by implementing current web best practices and technologies, revising the information architecture, creating a content strategy and revamping the visual design, we can provide our audiences with the best information in a more user-friendly fashion, motivate participation in the organization, and communicate the nature and impact of W3C more effectively.

First Public Working Drafts: Resize Observer; CSS Scroll Anchoring Module Level 1

The CSS Working Group has published two First Public Working Drafts today:

• Resize Observer: This specification describes an API for observing changes to Element’s size.
• CSS Scroll Anchoring Module Level 1: Changes in DOM elements above the visible region of a scrolling box can result in the page moving while the user is in the middle of consuming the content. This spec proposes a mechanism to mitigate this jarring user experience by keeping track of the position of an anchor node and adjusting the scroll offset accordingly.

CSS is a language for describing the rendering of structured documents (such as HTML and XML) on screen, on paper, etc.

Trace Context is a W3C Recommendation

The Distributed Tracing Working Group has published Trace Context as a W3C Recommendation. This specification defines standard HTTP headers and a value format to propagate context information that enables distributed tracing scenarios. The specification standardizes how context information is sent and modified between services. Context information uniquely identifies individual requests in a distributed system and also defines a means to add and propagate provider-specific context information.

W3C Workshop Report: Inclusive Design for Immersive Web Standards

W3C is pleased to announce a report from the W3C Workshop on Inclusive Design for Immersive Web Standards, held on 5-6 November 2019 in Seattle, WA, USA.

This report contains a brief summary and collects highlights from the individual sessions, with links to the presentation slides. Workshop participants learned from existing approaches that have been taken in making XR experiences (on and off the Web) accessible before looking at what lessons could be derived from these existing research and experiments in the context of the Immersive Web architecture.

These lessons brought forward four aspects of accessible XR experiences: visual interactions, motricity considerations, audio aspects and assistive technologies adaptation.

The relevant follow-up work in W3C spans across at least 6 standardization Working Groups and 6 pre-standardization and incubation Community Groups, and also intersects with at least 3 Khronos Working Groups – pointing toward the need for a strong coordination effort to ensure systematic and consistent progress for the Web platform. We propose to host this coordination in the Inclusive Design for the Immersive Web Community Group via a dedicated github repository.

We thank our host, Pluto VR, Maveron, We Make Reality, Virtual World Society and Seattle Immersive Technology Association, our sponsors, Google, Twitch and Samsung Internet, the Program Committee, and all participants for making this event possible.