HTML 5 A11y Task Force meeting
Monday, 12 April 2010
Josh recently attended the HTML 5 Accessibility (A11y) Task Force meeting in Birmingham. The task force is a sub group of the HTML 5 Working Group which is involved in ensuring that the HTML 5 specification is going to serve the needs of people with disabilities, and will in short be an accessible and inclusive specification!
The meeting was very productive and there were attendees from Apple, IBM, W3C, RNIB, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam, Opera and NCBI Centre For Inclusive Technology.
There were many topics covered in the meeting, including (but not limited to) alternate textual descriptions in HTML 5, the future of @longdesc, how validators should deal with incomplete structures (like missing alternative text), native semantics, WAI-ARIA, accessible multimedia and more.
Many thanks to Sally Cain and Marco Ranon of RNIB for being excellent hosts!