W3C/WAI/Education
Daniel Dardailler
W3C Director for Europe
Devint conference, Sophia Antipolis, June 4th 2004.
This presentation at: http://w3.org/2004/06/dd-wai-devint
W3C Exec Summary
The International Web Standardization Organization,
creator of HTML, XML, HTTP, Web Services, Semantic Web technologies, WAI
Guidelines, etc.
- Mission: Lead the Web to its full
potential
- Goals: Interoperability, Universality,
Functionalities
- How: Industry driven + Government Grants,
Neutral/nonforprofit, consensus based, fast process
- What: Working groups, working drafts, Open source
reference code
- ~370 members (130 in Europe), ~70 staff (25 in Europe)
- 3 hosts: MIT/ERCIM/Keio and 13 Offices (Europe, Africa, Asia, etc)
- Director Tim Berners-Lee, Web Inventor
Web original technologies
HTTP : the transfer protocol
GET /index.html HTTP/1.1
Accept-Charset: iso-8859-5, unicode-1-1
HTML/XML: the format of choice
<title> Web History </title>
<p> A paragraph of text </p>
URL: the addressing system: the glue
http://www.w3.org/People/danield
news:comp.windows.x
mailto:danield@w3.org
What does W3C do?
- Provide a neutral forum for meeting
- Technically expert from industry doing specification
editing
- Achieve consensus
- Reference open source code where appropriate
- End results: Working Drafts and Recommendations
W3C Web Technologies and Activities
Building the Foundation for the Web
WAI background
- Launched in 1997, multi-stakeholders (industry, goverment, disabibility
group, research), cross-disability
- Review of Web specifications
- Accessibility Guidelines for Web Content, Browser, AuthoringTools,
XML
- Accessibility Education & Outreach
- Tools development and R&D tracking.
WAI Update
- WCAG 1.0 a huge success, WCAG 2.0 on its way..
- ATAG 1.0 and UAAG 1.0 are building up momentum
- Policy development: harmonization is very
important!
- Evaluation/Certification support is developing
- Lots of support materials freely available
WAI and Education (1)
- WAI Education & Outreach Working Group: not focus on Education
domain, but on educating in general
- Wherever Web is used as delivery method, WAI is relevant
- and the Web is great for that: personalisation, modularity, open
formats, nagivation
- Additional Internet technologies: chat, email, archives,
teleconferencing: W3C uses all that but does not standardize them
- Web is great for Course content, and Assessment (e.g. online accessible
forms)
- Web is paramount for distant education (e-learning)
- Not just HTML: SVG, MathML, TimedText, SMIL, etc.
WAI and Education (2)
- Importance of Organisational Policies (reference WAI, speficy
conformance, define monitoring, etc)
- and Implementation Planning (assessment, training, development)
- Look for Authoring Tools compliant tools (Education =
participation)
- Evaluation tools always useful
Benefits of using Web Standards
- Guarantee of vendor independence (both software/hardware)
- Guarantee of interoperability (internally and externally)
- Guarantee of universality (language, culture, disability)
- Guarantee of evolvability
- Guarantee of durability
Public Resources