W3C

The Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AG WG) and the Accessible Platform Architectures (APA) Working Group have published the Working Group Note “Making Content Usable for People with Cognitive and Learning Disabilities” from the Cognitive and Learning Disabilities Accessibility Task Force (COGA). This document helps make web content, including applications, meet the needs of people with cognitive and learning disabilities. It covers aims and objectives for usable content; design patterns (ways) to make content usable; including users in research, design, and testing activities; personas; and user needs. The document provides informative "supplemental guidance" beyond the requirements of WCAG 2. It is not required for conformance to WCAG. We welcome comments for the next version of this document. To learn about W3C work on accessibility for people with cognitive and learning disabilities, see: Cognitive Accessibility at W3C.

The Web Authentication Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Web Authentication: An API for accessing Public Key Credentials Level 3 today. This specification defines an API enabling the creation and use of strong, attested, scoped, public key-based credentials by web applications, for the purpose of strongly authenticating users. This document is a straight lift of WebAuthn Level 2 Recommendation, preparing for updates to come.

The FIDO Alliance, EMVCo, and W3C announced today the renewal of the Web Payment Security Interest Group, to continue to enhance the security and interoperability of various Web payments technologies. The group participants will continue to define areas of collaboration and identify gaps between existing technical specifications in order to increase compatibility among different technologies.

See the Web Payment Security Interest Group Charter for more information, and read more in the EMV® Insights Post.

The Media Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of WebCodecs today. The specification defines interfaces to codecs for encoding and decoding of audio and video. It does not specify or require any particular codec or method of encoding or decoding but provides JavaScript interfaces to implementations of existing codec technology developed elsewhere. Implementers may support any combination of codecs or none at all.

Alongside this main specification, the Media Working Group also published two First Public Working Drafts to establish a registry for WebCodecs:

• The WebCodecs Codec Registry is intended to enhance interoperability among implementations and users of WebCodecs. In particular, this registry provides the means to identify and avoid collisions among codec strings and provides a mechanism to define codec-specific members of WebCodecs codec configuration dictionaries.
• The AVC (H.264) WebCodecs Registration is the first entry in the registry. It describes, for AVC (H.264), (1) the fully qualified codec strings, (2) the VideoDecoderConfig.description bytes, and (3) the codec-specific extensions to the VideoEncoderConfig.

Today we announced the Beta of a group calendaring service, developed by the W3C Systems Team. The tool aims to help W3C Groups schedule their meetings and share them with the W3C community. A new “Calendar” tab is now available from our group pages, lists all upcoming meetings a given group has scheduled, and enables in particular viewing times in different time zones (including your own), exporting and subscribing to an iCal feed.

This has been a long-standing request from W3C Groups to manage calendars of events, subscribe to them as well as easily view them on the Web, thus facilitating participation in, and scheduling of group meetings. You can read more in Jean-Gui Rouel’s blog posts about the tool’s discovery phase and about functionalities and future roadmap.