Plan

• W3C/Open Standards and Usability
• W3C Communications and Usability
• Q/A ?

W3C, Accessibility, Usability

• No Usability activity per se, but lots of cross fertility.
• Different message on Accessibility with WAI. Accessibility is about ensuring an equivalent user experience for people with disabilities
• WCAG2 close to a usability spec, but disability has ethical and legal requirements..
• Usability starts with Accessibility and Content/Function Identification.

WAI Site was redesigned with Web Usability in mind.

ISO 9241 Usability definition close to our goal with WAI: the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction with which specified users achieve specified goals in particular environments

Challenges...

• The Internet and the Web is the easy part : Web, email, forum, online chat, IM, etc.
• Lots of non-internet technologies: telephone, fax, PDA, SMS, MMS, Wifi, Bluetooth, RFID, biometric, smart cards, TV and radio, etc.
• New technology-specific platforms: geolocation, foaf blog, mashup, ads, etc.

Criteria: Content, Usability, Performance

W3C Exec Summary

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an International Consortium where Member and External organizations, a full-time technical staff, and the public work together to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing Web standards such as protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web.

• Goals: Interoperability, Universality, Functionalities
• Neutral/nonforprofit, consensus based, open participation, open results
• ~350 members, ~50 staff,
• ~60 Working Groups ~20 Coordination Groups and Interest Groups
• Hosting: MIT (America), ERCIM (Europe) and Keio University (Japan) + Offices
• Advisory Board, Technical Architecture Group
• Liaisons with 40+ other standards bodies, Accountable to the global Public

Director: WWW (http, HTML, URL) inventor Tim Berners Lee http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/

W3C Process Flow

Web Standards

WAI Web Accessibility Initiative

• Started in 1997, very successful at all levels, our policy driver too. WCAG2 for years.

  

• Usability and accessibility are often closely related

  Example: Client-side image maps compared with server-side ones

Separating Content and Presentation

Author Advantages

• Easier to write/change your documents, can be done in any order
• Easy to change the look of your documents, fashion
• Access to professional designs, services, templates
• Your documents are smaller, sharing
• Visible for more people/devices

Webmaster Advantages

• Separation of concerns
• Simpler HTML, less training, easier to manage
• Easy to change house style
• Reduces bandwidth
• Search engines find your stuff easier

Reader Advantages

• Faster download (one of the top 4 reasons for liking a site)
• Easier to find information, search for it with tools
• Information more accessible, can use more devices

Implementor Advantages

• Improves the implementation (separation of concerns)
• Can produce smaller browsers

W3C Eating its own dog food!

W3C works with thousands of engineers using the Web and the Internet as a platform.

• Everything under w3.org (public, member, team, acl fine granularity)
• Emails, open archives, specs, wiki (e.g. HTML5 WG today)
• Web 2.0 applications (action item, issues tracker, web survey)
• Instant Message (IRC) + bots for teleconferencing
• VOIP, slides in HTML/CSS, etc.

Some of our tools

• Meetings tools (either face to face or - mostly - on phone) see: http://www.w3.org/2004/12/wg-tools
  • logged IRC (RFC1459 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1459.txt) for minuting
  • Semantic Web based tool "Zakim" meeting and phonebridge management http://www.w3.org/2001/12/zakim-irc-bot.html
  • an "RRSAgent" bot to draft meeting minutes http://www.w3.org/2002/03/RRSAgent
  • action tracking, Issue tracking
  • good teleconference facilities
• Other communication tools
  • public and members only mailing list (100s) http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/
  • wikis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki
  • blogs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog
  • IRC (RFC1459 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1459.txt) for instant messaging
  • action tracking http://www.w3.org/2005/06/tracker/ , issue tracking ... http://esw.w3.org/topic/TrackingIssues
  • WBS: Web-Based Straw-poll and balloting system http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/1/

Summary

• Put everything on the Web, with a URL, and tracking will be trivial
• Use Open Internet and Web Standards that are proven to work
• Practice inclusiveness in a flat world (a shared file space with fine acl)
• Minute/record all discussions/decisions, with easy searchable archives
• Use independent facilitating tools like irc/zakim/tracker/rss/etc.