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WAI: Strategies, guidelines, resources to make the Web accessible to people with disabilities

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Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Home

1. Getting Started
2. Designing for Inclusion
3. Guidelines & Techniques
4. Planning & Implementing
5. Evaluating Accessibility
6. Presentations & Tutorials
7. Getting Involved with WAI
   1. Participating
   2. About WAI
   3. Using WAI Material
   4. Getting WAI Announcements
   5. WAI Groups
      1. Authoring Tool (AUWG)
      2. Education & Outreach (EOWG)
      3. Independent UI (Indie UI)
      4. Evaluation Tools (ERT WG)
      5. »Protocols & Formats (PFWG)
         1. How to Join (Participation)
         2. Charter
         3. Comments
         4. XTECH E-mail Archives
         5. PFWG E-mail Archives, Member
         6. PFWG Members Area
      6. Research (RDWG)
      7. User Agent (UAWG)
      8. WAI Interest Group (WAI IG)
      9. Web Content (WCAG WG)

Protocols and Formats Working Group (PFWG) Public Page

Announcements and Meetings

Face to face meeting 29 - 30 October 2012 in Lyon, France as part of TPAC 2012.

10 January 2012: Published WAI-ARIA 1.0 User Agent Implementation Guide Working Draft. This was previously published as a Last Call Working Draft but since then has undergone careful review to expand and clarify requirements. Therefore, this version is an ordinary Working Draft in order to collect public feedback on these changes. Please comment by 21 September 2012.

12 July 2012: Published Role Attribute 1.0 Candidate Recommendation. Please comment by 24 August 2012.

3 January 2012: Published Media Accessibility User Requirements First Public Working Draft. Please comment by 10 February 2012.

18 January 2011: Published WAI-ARIA 1.0 Candidate Recommendation. Read the WAI-ARIA publication announcement. Please comment by 25 February 2011.

Face to face meeting 5 - 7 March 2012 in Austin, TX

Current Work

Public Working Drafts under review

• 16 August 2012 Working Draft of Media Accessibility User Requirements.Comments should be made by 21 September 2012.
• 3 January 2012 First Public Working Draft of Media Accessibility User Requirements. Comments should be made by 25 February 2011.

Follow the instructions for commenting page to submit comments. Submit comments online (preferred) or by email to to public-pfwg-comments@w3.org (Archive).

Technology Review

W3C invites public comment on the Working Drafts in Last Call. The WAI and the Protocols and Formats Working Group invite anyone who perceives an access problem with these drafts to comment. Submit your comments as directed in the individual drafts; the email addresses vary from document to document.

Technical Specifications

Please note that Editors' Drafts:

• May not be up-to-date with recent Working Group decisions
• Do not necessarily represent Working Group consensus, that is, the drafts may include proposals that the Working Group has not agreed on
• May change frequently without public notification
• Include "Editorial notes" that are intended for public review and comment
• Include internal "Todo" notes and areas that are not ready for review

Edits to documents are posted regularly to the publicly visible editors' draft. People interested in following the work can subscribe to the public-pfwg-cvs mailing list to receive notification when changes are checked in. Techniques and examples of how to apply these technologies to create rich internet applications are discussed on the wai-xtech mailing list. See participation for how to follow or get involved in this work.

Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA)

WAI-ARIA, the Accessible Rich Internet Applications Suite, defines a way to make Web content and Web applications more accessible to people with disabilities. It especially helps with dynamic content and advanced user interface controls developed with Ajax, HTML, JavaScript, and related technologies.

The work has been divided into five documents.  The current editor's working drafts of these are:

Roadmap for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA Roadmap) (public editor's draft)

This roadmap that describes the problem, what W3C specifications will be used to correct the problem, and the timeline for the new specifications. See also the Public Working Draft of the WAI-ARIA Roadmap.

Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) (public editor's draft)

This specification provides an ontology of roles, states, and properties that set out an abstract model for accessible interfaces and can be used to improve the accessibility and interoperability of Web Content and Applications. This information can be mapped to accessibility frameworks that use this information to provide alternative access solutions. Similarly, this information can be used to change the rendering of content dynamically using different style sheet properties. The result is an interoperable method for associating behaviors with document-level markup. See also the Public version of WAI-ARIA.

WAI-ARIA Primer (public editor's draft)

Explains the accessibility problems posed by hybrid technologies such as DHTML and AJAX and introduces the technologies to map controls, AJAX live regions, and events to accessibility APIs. Also describes new navigation techniques to mark common Web elements such as menus, primary content, secondary content, banner information and other types of Web structures. See also the Public Working Draft of the WAI-ARIA Primer .

WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices (public editor's draft)

Provides recommended approaches to create accessible Web content using WAI-ARIA roles, states, and properties to make widgets, navigation, and behaviors accessible. Also describes considerations that might not be evident to most implementors from the WAI-ARIA specification alone. See also the Public Working Draft of the WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices.

WAI-ARIA User Agent Implementation Guide (public editor's draft)

Describes how user agents should map WAI-ARIA features to platform accessibility APIs. See also the Public Working Draft of the WAI-ARIA User Agent Implementation Guide.

Formal Public Working Drafts of these documents can be found from the WAI-ARIA Overview Page.

Role Attribute

The Role Attribute (public editor's draft) allows the author to annotate markup languages with machine-extractable semantic information about the purpose of an element. Use cases include accessibility, device adaptation, server-side processing, and complex data description. This attribute can be integrated into any markup language. The role attribute is necessary to support WAI-ARIA to define roles in XML-based languages, when the languages do not define their own role attribute. See also the Public Working Draft of the Role Attribute.

Media Accessibility User Requirements

Media Accessibility User Requiremenst (public editors' draft) aggregates the requirements of an accessibility user that the W3C HTML5 Accessibility Task Force has collected with respect to audio and video on the Web. See also the Public Working Draft of Media Accessibility User Requirements.

Task Forces

WAI-ARIA Task Force

This task force develops the WAI-ARIA technology. Currently we are processing comments received on the latest ARIA Working Draft. ARIA issues are tracked in the PFWG public comments tracker. The section on WAI-ARIA has further information about how to follow this work.

WAI-ARIA User Agent Implementation Task Force

The publicly visible User Agent Implementation Task Force is a joint task force of the PFWG and the HTML Working Group (HTML WG). The objective of UAI TF is to develop guidelines for interoperable user agent implementation of the WAI-ARIA specification. Discussion and meeting information is posted to the WAI-XTech mailing list with the subject prefix "aapi". The section on WAI-ARIA has further information about how to follow this work.

HTML Accessibility Task Force

The HTML Accessibility Task Force is a joint task force of the PFWG and the HTML Working Group (HTML WG). The objective of this task force is to review accessibility considerations for HTML 5. The work of this task force is mainly tracked in the HTML Accessibility Task Force wiki. The task force currently has a number of sub-groups focusing on Accessibility API Mapping ARIA integration, bug triage, canvas, media, and Text Alternatives .

Specification Accessibility Task Force

The Specification Accessibility Task Force assists the Working Group with accessibility review of W3C specifications. Currently this work is done by the working group as a whole.

Publications

In addition to the WAI-ARIA documents and the Role Attribute, the PFWG has been responsible in the past for the incorporation of a number of the accessibility improvements introduced into W3C formats from HTML 4.0 onward including CSS, SMIL, SVG and VoiceXML. Some specific publications developed in service of this work:

Inaccessibility of Visually-Oriented Anti-Robot Tests: Problems and Alternatives

This paper evaluates the accessibility problems with CAPTCHA, a visual verification system popular on many Web sites, and evaluates a number of more-accessible alternatives to the same problems CAPTCHA claims to solve.

Natural Language Usage -- Issues and Strategies for Universal Access to Information

This paper suggests a possible implementation of a language annotation system to clarify meaning in potentially ambiguous terms.

XML Accessibility Guidelines

The discussions for XAG take place on the public wai-xtech list. This specification is developed by the Working Group.

• HTML4 accessibility improvements
• CSS2 accessibility improvements
• SMIL accessibility improvements
• SVG accessibility Note

About the PFWG

Contacts

• PFWG Chair: Janina Sajka <janina@rednote.net>
• PFWG W3C Staff Contact: Michael Cooper <cooper@w3.org>

Activities

The PFWG looks at the formal Web technologies (protocols, formats, etc.) from an accessibility perspective. Best practices for using these technologies are addressed by other WAI groups, producing guidelines explaining how to use the technologies.

The principal output of this working group is feedback to other W3C working groups developing specification, on how to ensure that their work can allow for accessibility. This does not generally create deliverables in the form of W3C publications.

In particular, the group tries to review at least every Last Call working draft.

The PFWG also works on the XML Accessibility Guidelines (XAG).

Charter

The charter of the working group outlines the goals, work methods, and requirements for participation. It also explains why the working drafts and email archives of this group are in the members-only area. This activity is conducted by the W3C as part of its Web Accessibility Initiative

Participation

The participation page provides details about how to join the group.

To follow the work of the WG without joining, the following resources are available:

• Subscribe to public mailing lists;
• Review formal and editors' drafts of publications;
• Submit public comments on current work and review existing comments;
• Join task forces where participation requirements allow.

Mailing Lists

• wai-xtech@w3.org is a public list for discussion of items within PFWG's scope, where W3C Member-confidentiality is not required;
• public-pfwg-cvs@w3.org is a public non-archived announcement list to alert followers when edits to documents are committed;
• w3c-wai-pf@w3.org is a W3C member-confidential list for working group business, and for discussions of PFWG work where Member-confidentiality is required.

Anyone can join the wai-xtech and public-pfwg-cvs mailing lists. Follow Instructions for subscribing to the PFWG mailing lists; in short, send email to wai-pf-call@w3.org indicating which list you would like to join.

Some areas of related work

Protocols and Formats

On the growing edge of the Web we find Protocols and Formats such as:

• The Extensible Markup Language (XML) provides for continuous enhancement of the hypertext medium.
• The Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) which introduces symbolic representation of graphics.
• The Resource Description Framework (RDF) introduces knowledge about resources to the Web.
• The Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) offers a means to exchange multimedia content across the breadth of the Web.
• The Document Object Model (DOM) offers a neutral API for accessing the document tree.

Other WAI Groups

Most accessibility issues involve cooperative work between the PFWG and its sister groups within the WAI, particularly

• Evaluation and Repair Tools (ERT) which deals with assessing and correcting accessibility in Web pages
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) on the use of document formats to build resource webs of universal accessibility.
• User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG) analyzes user interface dialogs and requirements, and what browsers and access agents that form part of the adapted client can do to optimize access.
• Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) deals with the automation of accessible resource development and the accessibility of resource development automation.
• Education and Outreach (EOWG) carries the message to various segments of the Web community.

Patent Disclosures

W3C maintains a public list of any patent disclosures made in connection with the deliverables of the group; that page also includes instructions for disclosing a patent.

Janina Sajka <janina@rednote.net> - Chair, PFWG
Michael Cooper <cooper@w3.org> - Staff Contact