Web Standards
For Review: UAAG 2.0 Requirements
For Review: Updated WAI-ARIA Specification
Announcing the WaSP Curriculum Framework
In parallel to the wonderful work that Chris Mills and team are doing on the Opera Web Standards Curriculum, the Education Task Force has begun efforts since March this year on a complementary project: the WaSP Curriculum Framework. Our framework aims to identify the skill sets and competencies that aspiring Web professionals need to acquire to prepare them for their chosen careers.
In order to help educational institutions to identify and include material for these competencies, we are creating a set of foundation courses that can be readily adapted into an existing program at a college, school or university.
The framework will include a collection of tools:
- Course overviews
- Recommended course dependencies indicating what students will need to know before beginning each course
- Learning competencies describing what students must master in order to receive a passing grade
- Ideas for assignments and test questions that allow educators to measure a student’s mastery of each competency
- Recommended textbooks and readings, including articles from the Opera Web Standards Curriculum and other reputable sources
- A list of helpful resources, tools, and utilities specific to each course that will help both educators and students
Why is it called a framework? Given the velocity at which Web technology unravels, we recognize that required skill sets can change rapidly, and that the best way to keep this material useful is for the education community to enrich it with their expertise and experiences. In this way, the WaSP Curriculum Framework will be a “living curriculum” that we hope would be a knowledge base of required skills.
The framework will include guidelines to help educators around the world develop assignments and learning modules that address issues specific to their classrooms. These independently developed teaching materials can then be submitted back to the WaSP Curriculum Framework for review and potential inclusion in the project.
We are also actively working on connecting with other organizations and institutions to create as comprehensive a curriculum framework as possible.
We encourage everyone to get involved by contributing content to the framework upon its initial release in March 2009. In the meantime, join the WaSP Edu Facebook group to share your insights and participate in the discussion. Of course, there is always the WaSP EduTF public discussion list if Facebook isn’t your thing.
2008 survey of people who make websites
In case you haven’t seen it, please invest ten minutes of your time to complete the 2008 A List Apart survey so that we can build a snapshot of our industry.
Shared Web Experiences: Mobile and Accessibility Barriers
Curriculum Survey Results
Early in 2006, members of the Web Standards Project Education Task Force and the World Wide Web Consortium Quality Assurance Interest Group first met to discuss the need for a standards-based curriculum to aid Educational Professionals in higher education teach modern Web techniques. At that time, it was decided that more information was needed and could be gathered with a survey. Questions were formulated and much of the next year was spent taming an unruly survey engine.
The survey was launched in the second quarter of 2007 and educators in both secondary and higher education were targeted. The survey ran for approximately three months. After many starts, stops, and delays (which included the recruitment of Industry and Educational Professionals to the Task Force), the results of the survey are available.
When Educational Professionals were asked what their biggest challenges to implementing a curriculum for best practices, including accessibility and Web standards, they indicated the lack of appropriate materials and reference materials. With both the Opera Web Standards Curriculum and the Web Standards Project Curriculum Framework in active development, this should no longer be an issue.
Later this year, the Education Task Force plans to run another iteration of the survey. We hope to have multiple translations of the survey at that time. If you are interested in translating the survey into another language, please contact the Education Task Force.
Acid 2 Test Back to Normal
For a while now we’ve had a problem with the Acid 2 Test on the WaSP site. If you’re unfamiliar with the Acid 2 Test, it is essentially a test for browser vendors to use as a means to gauge their standards compliance. If your browser renders the Acid 2 Test page the same as the Acid 2 reference rendering, then you know you’re hitting the mark.
I’ll be honest: over the last 10 days, I’ve learned more about the Acid 2 Test than I ever wanted to know. If you want to do the same, you might start with Acid 2: The Guided Tour.
The short version is that part of Acid 2 is a test for the way a browser handles an <object> element when the data attribute references a URL that returns an HTTP status code of 404. A number of caching rules, mod_rewrite rules and redirects all collided to create a problem with our 404. The cached version of our 404 page was returning an HTTP status of 200. As you might expect, this basically makes the test useless.
Acid 2 was broken. Now it is not. Carry on.
British Standard for accessibility
The British Standards Institution (BSI) has invited two members of the WaSP, Bruce Lawson and Patrick Lauke, to join the drafting committee for the first British Standard for Web Accessiblity.
Two years ago, the BSI was sponsored by the Disability Rights Commission to write a Publicly Available Specification (PAS) called PAS 78: Guide to Commissioning Accessible Websites. Publicly Available Specifications are written quickly and “expire” after two years, but because of the popularity of PAS 78, the BSI have decided to update it to become a full British Standard.
We’ve just started work on the draft, which doesn’t yet have a title, although our working title is “encouraging the development of fantastic user experiences for disabled people online”.
Consequently, it’s too early to say what will be in BS8878, which will be released next spring. I can say that it will not tread on the toes of whichever version of WCAG is live then, as it’s a document to help site owners rather than developers. Like PAS 78, it will encourage adherence to current web standards.
Neither can I say who else is on the committee, except that it’s chaired by Julie Howell, and there are representatives from all over industry—broadcasting, banking, legal, education and (crucially) representatives of disability groups, including groups working with those with cognitive disabilities.
Patrick and I gratefully acknowledge our employers, Opera Software and the University of Salford, who are supporting us by paying our travel expenses and giving us time off to attend meetings and write the drafts. They have nothing material to gain by supporting us, and are exercising no editorial control, but are helping to make disabled people’s experiences of the web better.
As a procedural footnote, now that Derek Featherstone has moved role within WaSP to be Group Lead, I’m working with Patrick to be co-lead of the Accessiblity Task Force. Our main projects will be the British Standard, continuing to work with the microformats community testing various date-time patterns with screenreaders, and monitoring the developments in HTML5.
Opera Web Standards Curriculum
The curriculum is intended to provide a comprehensive set of tutorials designed to raise the level of education and Web Standards awareness. The curriculum has been released under a Creative Commons license and is free to use and share.
Chris states:
We think it will be useful to anyone who wants to learn or teach client-side web design/development “the right way”, including students and teachers at schools or universities, trainers and employees inside companies, etc. It already has support from several universities and large companies, including Yahoo!
Translations and packaging of the curriculum as PDFs is on the to-do list.