Introduction

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Accessible Platform Architectures Working Group (APA WG)

• review of W3C specifications
• development of technical support materials
• collaboration with other Working Groups
• coordination of harmonized accessibility strategies within W3C

Review of specifications

• W3C wants specifications to address all users
• APA reviews for ability to meet needs of users with disabilities, and not create barriers
• Review requires expertise on a growing number of technologies
• Early review could be incomplete, later review could be too late

W3C work venues

• Working Groups
• Interest Groups
• Community Groups
• Workshops

W3C development process

• Often, incubation leading to Community Group Reports
• Working Drafts to develop features and obtain review
• Candidate Recommendation to test implementability and measure acceptance
• Recommendation to become a formal standard

Potential accessibility issues

• Introduce unintentional barriers
• Fail to meet a relevant user need
• Design for only subset of audience
• Not provide ways to interact with assistive technology
• Create interference with accessibility services

Early review

• It is most effective to identify potential issues early in the technology maturation process
• APA participates in workshops and community groups when possible
• APA looks at every First Public Working Draft to determine holistic issues with technology
• Can be difficult to predict issues if technology isn't mature enough, yet
• Overly mature technologies at First Public Working Draft stage aren't as amenable to input as they should be

Identifying concrete issues

• Sometimes caught in early review
• Often requires further review as specification approaches maturity with final feature set
• Important to catch accessibility barriers or omissions
• File comment with group, ideally with suggested changes
  • Feature change
  • Feature addition
  • Feature removal
  • Accessibility impact statement

Engaging directly with groups

• Comments can require joint meetings to explore issues and solutions more completely
• When groups develop technologies that regularly impact accessibility, can be best to engage over longer timespan
• APA forms joint task forces to explore specific topics: CSS, HTML, Payments

Identification of higher accessibility challenges

• Some issues emerge that exceed the scope of a single comment on a single specification
• APA starts projects to explore these in detail

Navigation

• CSS provides ways to position content on screen in a different way
• Keyboard navigation follows source code order
• Can result in focus moving in ways that are not predictable from on-screen display
• Proposals to solve in various ways have had issues
• Under exploration by the CSS Accessibility Task Force

Knowledge Domain

• W3C provides content languages like MathML to represent specific types of content
• There is a need for other types of content, like chemistry, music, linguistics, physics
• These areas have some related needs, as well as unique ones
• Proliferation of e-books has increased need for interoperable ways to represent this content
• Need to define ways to make this content accessible at the same time
• Knowledge Domain Community Group exploring this

Authentication

• Password-based authentication has many issues including for accessibility
• W3C has finalized Web Authentication standard to provide new approach with opportunity for accessibility
• CAPTCHA often used in authentication mechanisms which create barriers
• APA updating Inaccessibility of CAPTCHA paper to update guidance

Media

• When HTML 5 added multimedia support, needed to ensure support for caption and description tracks was sufficient
• HTML Accessibility Task Force developed Media Accessibility User Requirements
• APA references those in many other media reviews
• Encrypted Media Extensions created new risks that APA had to evaluate

Payments

• W3C developing a set of specifications for web payments
• Also creates risks and opportunities for accessibility
• Web Payments and Commerce Accessibility Community Group exploring those issues
• Eventually hope to produce a Payments Accessibility User Requirements

Emerging Technologies

These technologies are in preliminary exploration at W3C and may have accessibility benefits or impacts:

• Artificial intelligence
• Automotive
• Games
• Immersive reality
• Web of things

Research Questions Task Force

• Conducts literature reviews to inform APA activity
• Identifies issues that need more research
• Engages with other groups to provide research guidance

Challenges for APA

• Technology expertise
• Volume of work
• Variable working cultures and input mechanisms
• Timelines

Framework for Accessible Specification of Technologies

• Provides information to technology developers about accessibility needs
• Currently structured as a draft standard and checklist
  • Full framework: w3c.github.io/apa/fast/
  • Checklist: w3c.github.io/apa/fast/checklist

Ways to Contribute

• File issues in GitHub: github.com/w3c/apa/issues/new
• Send email: public-apa@w3.org
• Participate in the APA Working Group: w3.org/WAI/GL/participation