W3C announced today a Workshop on Augmented Reality on the Web, 15-16 June 2010 in Barcelona (Spain). Augmented reality (AR) is a long standing topic in its own right but it has not been developed on the Web platform. As mobile devices become more powerful and feature-rich, the workshop will explore the possible convergence of AR and the Web. The objective of this Workshop is to provide a single forum for researchers and technologists to discuss the state of the art for AR on the Web, particularly the mobile platform, and what role standardization should play for Open Augmented Reality. Position papers are due 29 May. Please see the Call for Participation for more information.

The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG) has updated the following resources as part of the WAI-AGE Project:

• Contacting Organizations about Inaccessible Websites provides guidance on encouraging organizations to make their websites accessible, particularly when you find accessibility barriers on a website.
• Involving Users in Web Projects for Better, Easier Accessibility describes how project managers, designers, developers, editors, and others can better understand accessibility issues and implement more effective accessibility solutions by getting people with disabilities involved from the beginning of projects.
• Involving Users in Evaluating Web Accessibility provides the basics for anyone wanting to ensure that their websites, applications, and tools work well for people with disabilities.

More about these resources is in the blog posts Discover new ways of thinking about accessibility and Take a few minutes to encourage web accessibility. Your voice counts. Learn about Accessibility and visit the WAI home page.

The RDFa Working Group has published the First Public Working Drafts of RDFa Core 1.1 and XHTML+RDFa 1.1. RDFa Core is a specification for attributes to express structured data in any markup language. XHTML+RDFa 1.1 is an application of RDFa Core 1.1 for XHTML. Both of these documents are expected to supersede the RDFa in XHTML (RDFa 1.0) specification. Together, these specifications enable the human-readable and machine-readable markup of people, places, events, products, recipes, social networks, and many other concepts that are frequently published on the web. These documents improve upon RDFa 1.0 by adding a number of Web community requested features to ease authoring. Learn more about the Semantic Web.

On Thursday, April 22, Judy Brewer, Director of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), will be among those testifying at a Hearing on Achieving the Promise of the Americans with Disabilities Act in the Digital Age – Current Issues, Challenges, and Opportunities before the US House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties. In her testimony, she will speak about how web accessibility has progressed over the past ten years, and why it is important to continue to lower accessibility barriers on the web as we rely more heavily on the web for education, employment, health care, social networking, and more. Learn about W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

W3C has updated the popular online training course "Introduction to Mobile Web Best Practices" for 2010. The first run of this updated course begins on Monday, 10 May. Early Bird registration ends this Friday, 23 April! (although full registration remains open until after the course has begun).

Led by members of W3C's Mobile Web Initiative, people attending the course will:

• learn about the specific promises and challenges of the mobile platform;
• learn how to use W3C's Mobile Web Best Practices to design mobile-friendly Web content and to adapt existing content for mobile;
• learn client side and server side techniques for adapting your content to different classes of device.

Learn more about the Mobile Web Initiative.

The Web Applications Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of Widget Access Request Policy. User agents running widgets are expected to provide access to potentially sensitive APIs (phone book, calendar, file system, etc.) that expose data which should not be exposed without the user's consent. The purpose of this specification is to define the security model for network interactions from within a widget that has access to sensitive information. It provides means for a widget to declare its intent to access specific network resources so that a policy may control it. Follow the group's development of an implementation report and learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The Web Applications Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of View Mode Media Feature. Web applications, be they widgets or in-browser, can on most platforms be run in multiple visual modes. At times they may occupy the entire screen, at others they may be minimized to a specific docking area; at times they may have chrome that matches the operating system's style while at others they may be providing their own controls. The user is generally in control of at least several aspects of these modalities, and it is therefore important for authors to be able to react to these in order to provide different styling to their applications. In order to achieve this, this specification defines a media feature that allows different CSS style rules to be applied depending on whether a given media query matches. Comments are welcome through 18 May. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.