W3C Browser and Accessibility News Bits

W3CThree bits of news from the W3C this week related to browsers and accessibility. Well, two about browsers and two about accessibility with one of them acting as my cross-over reference.

The User Agent Accessibility Guidelines Working Group has published an updated Working Draft of the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG) 2.0. This is not the same as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, but instead this is targeted at browser makers and other makers of software for remote viewing, such as media players, RSS readers, and so on. The intent is to outline the standards they must meet to be accessible to people with disabilities. W3C is looking for comments now before “last call” (your last chance to weigh in). There is also a working draft of the Implementing UAAG 2.0 supporting document, which is at least worth a glance over the main guidelines.

If you are somehow connected to the process of making a web browser, or are just oddly curious, W3C has created a new mailing list for fostering discussion related to web browser performance. It’s brand new, so as of this writing there are no posts other than a test post and unsub instructions. You can check it out, and perhaps if it grows, even join it at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-web-perf/.

Bringing it back to accessibility, the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG) published a document to help you make presentations, talks, meetings, and training accessible to all of your potential audience, including people with disabilities. W3C announced it on its blog (Make Your Presentations Accessible to All) and provided a link directly to the document, How to Make Presentations Accessible to All. To steal a bit from its intro, the general gist is that presenters should be aware that some of their audience might not be able to:

In short, speakers need to describe pertinent visual content, speak clearly into the microphone, ensure the facility is accessible, and consider the other points below (go read the document to see the other points).

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