At ALHAUS we are focused on providing inclusive content to ensure that everyone has equal access to the great content on your website.

In order to support this effort, we offer a monthly roundup of the latest and greatest news on international accessibility. Here are the most important updates and developments in international accessibility this month.

W3C strategic highlights for Spring 2017 and advisory committee meeting (W3C)

Jeff Jaffe

After the annual meeting in Beijing, W3c has announced it’s strategic highlights. These highlights include strengthening the core of the web; exciting with next level experience; meeting industry needs; and extending the reach of the web. Using these strategic highlights, The Strategy Team has worked to build a 3-5 year implementation strategy. 

In memoriam -- Pierre Danet (W3C)

Bill McCoy

A sad day in accessibility development. Pierre Danet, Chief Digital Officer of Hachette-Livre Group, was a long-time Board member of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), and founding President, of the European Digital Reading Lab (EDRLab), has passed away. Danet contributed greatly to accessibility efforts in digital publishing and he will be missed greatly by the community. You can read Danet’s French language obituary on Acutalitté.

Bangladesh wins international accolades for daisy standard accessible reading materials (Global Accessibility News)

On 13 June 2017, the United Nation’s International Telecommunication Union awarded Bangaladesh the world’s most prestigious IT award. The award called the “World Summit on Information Society Prize” was awarded to the Access to Information Program of the Prime Minister’s Office of Bangladesh for the project “DAISY standard Accessible Reading Materials for Persons with Visual Disabilities.” DAISY has converted all regular school textbooks into user-friendly audio books that can be accessed by both students and the low-literate population online. 

Yes RDF is all well and good but does it scale? (W3C)

Phil Archer

Recently there have been many concerns that Linked Data, RDF, and the Semantic Web doesn’t scale. W3C, in coordination with Big Data Europe, is running a series of pilots in seven different societal areas. All seven of these pilots are processing large amounts of data in various formats, showing that these all have the potential to scale. W3C will announce the success of the pilots International at the Semantic Web Conference in Vienna this October.

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