W3C

The Protocols and Formats Working Group today published a First Public Working Draft of Core Accessibility API Mappings 1.1 (Core-AAM), which supports the updated Working Draft of Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.1. WAI-ARIA provides an ontology of roles, states, and properties that define accessible user interface elements. WAI-ARIA is designed to improve the accessibility and interoperability of web content, particularly web applications. Core-AAM describes how user agents should expose semantics of content languages to accessibility APIs across multiple content technologies (including much of WAI-ARIA). Core-AAM serves as the basis for other specifications to extend the mappings to specific technologies. Learn more from the call for review e-mail and read about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

The Web Applications Working Group has published three documents today:

• A First Public Working Draft of DOM Level 3 KeyboardEvent key Values. This specification defines the values for the KeyboardEvent.key attribute, which is defined as part of the Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Events Specification. The key attribute contains information about the character generated by the key event.
• A First Public Working Draft of DOM Level 3 KeyboardEvent code Values. This specification defines the values for the KeyboardEvent.code attribute, which is defined as part of the Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Events Specification. The code value contains information about the key event that can use used identify the physical key being pressed by the user.
• A Working Draft of UI Events. This specification extends the events and features defined in DOM Events Level 3.

Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

Today the W3C announced the final report from the Linking Geospatial Data workshop that was held in London 5 – 6 March 2014.

The report contains a summary of each of the major themes discussed and conclusions arising from them. The workshop was supported by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), Google, the UK mapping agency Ordnance Survey and the UK government. W3C’s participation was funded by the EU-funded SmartOpenData project.

Participants included many geospatial experts from both the government and private sectors, and the presented papers focused on integrating geospatial information systems with the Web of Data. Although carefully advertised so as not to promote Linked Data to the exclusion of other methods, this emerged strongly as the preferred technology to enable that integration.

The Workshop report identifies several themes that recurred throughout the discussion. A consensus of the participants was that joint work between W3C and OGC should be pursued to address the needs identified in these themes.