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For Review: W3C Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 3.0 First Working Draft (2021-Jan-21)

W3C Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 3.0 First Public Working Draft is published for review. W3C Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 3 has several differences from Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.

We encourage you to start by reading the WCAG 3 Introduction first to get important background on WCAG 3 development, review guidance, and timeline.

WCAG 3 is intended to be easier to understand and more flexible than WCAG 2. The flexibility is to address different types of web content, apps, and tools — as well as organizations and people with disabilities. This WCAG 3 Draft proposes a different name, scope, structure, and draft conformance model.

We are seeking input from evaluators, developers, designers, project managers, policy makers, people with disabilities, and others — particularly on the structure and the draft conformance model. Additional review guidance is in the blog post WCAG 3 FPWD Published. Please submit comments by 26 February 2021.

For Review: Challenges with Accessibility Guidelines Conformance and Testing, and Approaches for Mitigating Them (2020-Jun-19)

The Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AG WG) has published an updated Working Draft of Challenges with Accessibility Guidelines Conformance and Testing, and Approaches for Mitigating Them. This document is part of work on future accessibility guidelines, including WCAG 3.0. It explores the challenges of evaluating a broad range of websites and applications for conformance to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), and explores approaches for mitigating these challenges. Please see the blog post for information on this document and questions for review: Challenges with Accessibility Guidelines Conformance and Testing, and Approaches for Mitigating Them - blog.

New Videos Introduce Web Accessibility - Great for GAAD (2020-May-14)

The Accessibility Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG) has published 5 short videos that introduce evaluation resources from the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). The animated videos cover: Easy Checks — A First Review of Web Accessibility, Evaluation Tools, Conformance Evaluation including the Report Tool, and Involving Users in Web Accessibility. Other WAI videos include: Video Introduction to Web Accessibility and W3C Standards and the Web Accessibility Perspectives videos that demonstrate how accessibility is essential for some and useful for all. These videos are particularly useful to share for Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) on 21 May 2020 — along with the free online course: Introduction to Web Accessibility.

For Review: RTC Accessibility User Requirements (RAUR) First Draft (2020-Mar-19)

The First Public Working Draft of the Working Group Note RTC Accessibility User Requirements (RAUR) is now available for review. RAUR outlines user needs, requirements, and scenarios for real-time communication (RTC) to be accessible to people with disabilities. Accessible telecommunication technology is increasingly important for people who are working remotely and relying on RTC for daily needs. The purpose of this document is to inform the development of specifications and underlying architecture at W3C and beyond. Some of the requirements apply at the system or platform level, and some are authoring requirements. We would particularly like input on any user needs or requirements that are missing from this draft. For more information, see the blog post RTC Accessibility User Requirements – Call for Review.

WAI-ARIA 1.1, Core-AAM 1.1, DPub-ARIA 1.0, and DPub-AAM 1.0 are W3C Proposed Recommendations (2017-Oct-01)

The Accessible Rich Internet Applications Working Group has published Proposed Recommendations of Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.1, Core Accessibility API Mappings 1.1, Digital Publishing WAI-ARIA Module 1.0, and Digital Publishing Accessibility API Mappings. WAI-ARIA recommends approaches for developers to make widgets, navigation, and behaviors accessible to people with disabilities. WAI-ARIA 1.1 adds features new since WAI-ARIA 1.0 to complete the HTML + ARIA accessibility model and supports additional modules for digital publishing and graphics. DPub-ARIA defines a WAI-ARIA module encompassing an ontology of roles, states and properties specific to the digital publishing industry. This allows an author to convey user interface behaviors and structural information to assistive technologies and to enable semantic navigation, styling and interactive features used by readers. User agent implementation to date is shown in the WAI-ARIA implementation report, Core-AAM implementation report, DPub-ARIA implementation report, and DPub-AAM implementation report. Comments are welcome through 30 November 2017.

Personalization Semantics 1.0 First Public Working Draft (2017-Jun-06)

Personalization Semantics 1.0 has been published as a First Public Working Draft. Personalization involves tailoring aspects of the user experience to meet the needs and preferences of the user. The introduction of standardized semantics allows web applications to customize the exposure of that content to one that is familiar to individuals based on their needs and preferences. This specification was initially developed in a task force to provide technology features needed to meet needs of users with cognitive or learning disabilities, but is intended to support a wide variety of personalization use cases. Please comment by filing GitHub issues in the personalization semantics repository or, if this is not feasible, by email to public-aria@w3.org, by 30 June 2017. Read about the Accessible Rich Internet Applications Working Group and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

Digital Publishing Accessibility API Mappings 1.0 is a Candidate Recommendation (2017-Jun-06)

Digital Publishing Accessibility API Mappings (DPub-AAM) 1.0 has been published as a Candidate Recommendation and is now undergoing implementation finalization and testing. DPub-AAM describes how roles in the Digital Publishing WAI-ARIA Module 1.0 should be exposed to accessibility APIs. Implementation of this specification makes it possible for assistive technologies to provide enhanced navigation among landmarks unique to digitally-published documents, and to identify document-specific features which should be presented to the user, such as crossing a page boundary. These mappings will also be used in part for verifying implementation success of Digital Publishing WAI-ARIA Module 1.0 which is already a Candidate Recommendation. The draft implementation report shows the progress of testing. Please send implementation information or comments by 7 July 2017.

User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 and UAAG 2.0 Reference published as Working Group Notes (2015-Dec-15)

The User Agent Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (UAWG) has published User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG 2.0) and UAAG 2.0 Reference as W3C Working Group Notes. UAAG 2.0 defines how browsers, media players, and other "user agents" should support accessibility for people with disabilities and work with assistive technologies. Although W3C does not currently have plans to advance UAAG 2.0 to Recommendation, the need and opportunity to improve accessibility in user agents still exists. We hope that this work will be continued in future combined Guidelines group. UAAG 2.0 provides specific accessibility guidance for user agent developers who want to build a better user experience for all users. See the UAAG Published as Notes e-mail for additional info.

For Review: IndieUI: Events and IndieUI: User Context Drafts Updated (2015-Apr-30)

Updated Working Drafts of IndieUI: Events and IndieUI: User Context are available for review. IndieUI defines a way for different user interactions to be translated into simple events and communicated to web applications. These drafts include a reduction in scope for the 1.0 version, and minor property and interface changes. See:

IndieUI Overview for a short introduction,
IndieUI: Events 1.0 - Events for User Interface Independence - for the Events draft,
IndieUI: User Context 1.0 – Contextual Information for User Interface Independence - for the User Context draft,
Requirements for IndieUI: Events 1.0 and IndieUI: User Context 1.0 for requirements the specification should meet,
Updated Working Draft: IndieUI Events - for Mobile and More e-mail for information on updates,
Mobile Accessibility to learn about related work.

The IndieUI Working Group is currently exploring moving this work to other Working Groups; however, comments on these drafts are still welcomed, preferably by 29 May 2015.