W3C

Accessibility Requirements for People with Low Vision, developed by the Low Vision Accessibility Task Force (LVTF), was published today by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (WCAG WG). This document describes what people with low vision need for electronic content, tools, and technologies to be accessible. It includes an overview of low vision and describes specific user needs. It does not set technical requirements. It provides the background for planned future work on guidance for making web content, tools, and technologies accessible to people with low vision. Comments are welcome by 14 April 2016. Read about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

The Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG) and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (WCAG WG) have published a new version of How to Meet WCAG 2.0: A customizable quick reference to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 requirements (success criteria) and techniques. It provides a customizable view of WCAG 2.0 resources, including: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 web standard, Techniques for WCAG 2.0 implementation guidance, and Understanding WCAG 2.0 supporting information. Information on these resources is provided in the WCAG Overview and The WCAG 2.0 Documents. This new version provides a significantly updated user interface and additional functionality to filter by Tags that are categorized under Developing, Interaction Design, Content Creation, and Visual Design. (The previous version is still available.) Learn more about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG) has published an updated version of the WCAG-EM Report Tool: Website Accessibility Evaluation Report Generator. The tool helps you generate website accessibility evaluation reports according to Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology (WCAG-EM). WCAG-EM is an informative W3C Working Group Note. It describes an approach for evaluating how websites, including web applications and websites for mobile devices, conform to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. We welcome feedback on this version of the WCAG-EM Report Tool and suggestions for improvements for the next version. Learn more about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

The WebFonts Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of WOFF File Format 2.0. Based on experience with WOFF 1.0, which is widely deployed, this specification was developed to provide improved compression and thus lower use of network bandwidth, while still allowing fast decompression even on mobile devices. This is achieved by combining a content-aware preprocessing step and improved entropy coding, compared to the Flate compression used in WOFF 1.0.

The Working Group has also published a Group Note of WOFF 2.0 Evaluation Report. Web Open Font Format (WOFF) 2.0 is a proposed update to the existing WOFF 1.0 with improved compression. This report lists requirements for successful deployment, evaluates how the requirement may be met, and examines the compression gains and tradeoffs vs. code complexity, encode and decode time. This document is non-normative.

The Web Platform Working Group has published an updated Working Draft of HTML 5.1. In this version of the 5th major version of the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the core language of the World Wide Web, new features continue to be introduced to help Web application authors, new elements continue to be introduced based on research into prevailing authoring practices, and special attention continues to be given to defining clear conformance criteria for user agents in an effort to improve interoperability.

Please, read more about the group’s plans to establish a regular rhythm of publication and how the group is working toward an HTML 5.1 Recommendation later this year.

The Web Platform Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of WebIDL Level 1. This document defines an interface definition language, Web IDL, that can be used to describe interfaces that are intended to be implemented in web browsers. Web IDL is an IDL variant with a number of features that allow the behavior of common script objects in the web platform to be specified more readily. How interfaces described with Web IDL correspond to constructs within ECMAScript execution environments is also detailed in this document. It is expected that this document acts as a guide to implementors of already-published specifications, and that newly published specifications reference this document to ensure conforming implementations of interfaces are interoperable.