Matt May

Contact

30 November 2004: Gilbane Content Management Technologies Conference: Keynote panel: "Open" Document Formats, XHTML vs. HTML, XSL vs. CSS & Other Industry Debates

Team contact, Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) Working Group: The AUWG is working on guidelines for helping tools such as HTML editors (FrontPage, Dreamweaver, GoLive), multimedia tools (QuickTime, Premiere, Final Cut Pro), and content management systems (including blogging tools) to produce accessible content.
Team contact, User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG) Working Group: The UAWG is developing test suites to assist developers of user agents (a term which includes Web browsers as well as search systems like Apple's Sherlock and other means of accessing Web content) in evaluating their products for compliance with UAAG. The UAWG is also reformulating in order to design a next-generation set of guidelines.
Protocols and Formats Working Group (PFWG): I am the acting staff contact for the PFWG, which works on making sure that Web protocols and document formats are designed with accessibility in mind.
Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG): I am working with the EOWG on a project to redesign the WAI site, including navigation and style. I also work with the W3C communications team on the main W3C home page.
W3C liaison, Accessibility Forum: The Accessibility Forum develops documents to support purchasing departments in the United States government in complying with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, which requires, among other things, that government-run or -contracted Web sites meet standards of accessibility.

Here are a few other things I've been thinking about:

Writing a simple Web accessibility primer
A language for centralizing glossary items on a site-by-site basis, or by reference (RDF)

I keep a weblog on a variety of topics, including accessibility, at bestkungfu.com.

QuickTips: The WAI presents accessibility in two minutes. If this is too terse for you, stay tuned. I'm working on accessibility in 30 minutes.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0: The standard for designing accessible HTML-based sites.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0: An update to the WCAG standard, designed to be more generic (that is, addressing more than just HTML). Many of the questions presented in WCAG 1 are addressed in WCAG 2: my advice to WCAG 1 adopters is, when you find one of these questions, refer to WCAG 2 for another point of view. WCAG 2 is under development.