W3C Open Source Software – News for 2025

b6+ version 1.154

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

• Users of screen readers (an accessibility tool) can press the N key during a presentation to hear the comment (speaker notes) for the current slide. Press N a second time to again hear the contents of the slide itself.
• Bug fix: Again for users of screen readers: When going backwards through a list of incrementally displayed elements, the current element is spoken, just as when going forward.
• B6+ sets the ARIA attribute role=application, to signal to screen readers that it wants to handle keystrokes. But it is not clear if that leads to the best user interface for all screen readers, so, as an experimental feature, you can tell b6+ to not set that attribute.
• Improvements to the function to toggle comments on/aff in index mode, so that the display jumps less when comments are turned on or off.
• Some performance enhancements.

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.