W3C Open Source Software – News for 2025

b6+ version 1.154

2025-11-21 B6+, the slide framework, has some improvements, especially for accessibility:

1) Users of screen readers can press the N key to hear the speaker notes for the current slide. Press N a second time to again hear the contents of the slide itself.

2) Bug fix, for users of screen readers: When going backwards instead of forward through a list of incrementally displayed elements, the current element wasn't spoken. Now it is.

3) B6+ sets the ARIA attribute role=application. But it is not clear if that leads to the best user interface with all screen readers. So, as an experimental feature, you can tell b6+ to not set that attribute.

4) Improvements to the function to toggle comments on/off in index mode, so that the display jumps less when comments are turned on or off.

b6+ version 1.147

2025-05-09 B6+, the slide framework, has a number of new features:

• When a slide contains a video or audio, it is rewound each time the slide is displayed. And when it is set to “autoplay”, it also starts automatically.
• Setting the class “textfit” on a slide causes b6+ to automatically reduce the font size on that slide if needed to make it fit on the slide. The class can also be set on the BODY element.
• Similarly, the class “autosize” can be set on images, to let b6+ try and scale them down and avoid that a slide overflows.
• If there is an external screen attached, b6+ will automatically try to use that when going into slide mode. (Not supported by all browsers.)
• A button and a key press allow toggling the display of speaker notes in index mode. The notes are initally hidden, but that can be reversed with a class or a URL parameter.

b6+ version 1.132

2025-02-21 B6+, the slide framework, now includes a guide for style sheet writers, to help with making new slide styles.

html-xml-utils 8.7

2025-02-16 Version 8.7 of the HTML-XML-utils fixes a bug in hxnormalize that caused some lines in the output to be shorter than requested by the -l option.

b6+ version 1.124

2025-02-13 B6+, the slide framework, has two new features:

• B6+ supports a simple form of “slipshow” presentations: Rather than putting all topics on separate slides, you add them one by one to a long ‘scroll’ that automatically moves earlier topics up to make room for the next one. (See an example.)
• B6+ allows drawing on the slide with the mouse, e.g., to underline text or circle some items. This could replace a laser pointer and is also useful when screen-sharing in a video conference.

b6+ version 1.116

2025-01-06 B6+, the slide framework, now supports automatic slide shows, where the next slide appears after a given time. They can be paused with a key press. Running continuously in a loop is also possible.

b6+ version 1.111

2025-01-01 B6+, the slide framework, now has the possibility to pop up a table of contents while showing slides, to allow quickly jumping to a specific slide. The C key opens (and closes) the table of contents.

There are several other, smaller inprovements, including some to try and improve accessibility.