Education and Outreach Working Group Charter

The mission of the Education and Outreach Working Group is to develop strategies and resources to promote awareness, understanding, implementation, and conformance testing for W3C accessibility standards; and to support the accessibility work of other W3C Groups.

Join the Education and Outreach Working Group.

Start date 23 August 2017
End date 30 June 2020
Initial Chairs Brent Bakken, Sharron Rush
Initial Team Contacts Shawn Henry (0.35 FTE), Eric Eggert (0.05 FTE)
Meeting Schedule Teleconferences: Weekly. Additional calls that are more convenient in different time zones, and additional Task Force calls, may also be held.
Face-to-face: EOWG usually meets during the W3C Technical Plenary week. Additional face-to-face meetings may be scheduled by consent of the participants, usually no more than 3 per year.
Asynchronous: EOWG uses GitHub and surveys to support asynchronous contributions.

Introduction

Accessibility is a key aspect of W3C's commitment to a Web for All. W3C standards include accessibility guidelines and technical specifications. However, accessibility is not as widely known and understood as many areas of W3C work. Understanding and implementing W3C's accessibility standards is quite complex.

The Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG) fills an important role to raise awareness and to support organizations and individuals in understanding, implementing, and testing conformance to W3C accessibility standards.

The Education and Outreach Working Group supports W3C's mission by:

Supporting Resources

EOWG resources have proven valuable to promoting understanding, implementing, and testing conformance to W3C accessibility standards. The community relies on authoritative support from EOWG resources. For example, community use of and appreciation for recent resources has been clear [1], including for:

While EOWG has updated some resources recently, others need to be updated, as noted by members of W3C and the public. EOWG has determined that updating, revising, and redesigning resources is a high priority, and that work is the most substantial group of deliverables in this charter.

EOWG Charter 2017 Additional Information provides:

Scope

Activities within the scope of this EOWG charter include:

  1. Develop resources that support understanding, implementing, and testing conformance to W3C accessibility standards.
  2. Update, revise, and redesign existing EOWG resources to better meet users' needs in the current environment.
  3. Conduct direct outreach activities to promote W3C accessibility standards and resources. Encourage and support other's outreach activities.
  4. Support accessibility education and outreach throughout W3C, including in Accessibility Guidelines Working Group, Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) Working Group, Publishing@W3C activities, and other groups.

Out of Scope

EOWG will not develop W3C Recommendations.

Success Criteria

  • Updating and developing resources supporting EOWG's mission, defined in the Deliverables section below.
  • Greater use of WAI resources among W3C Members and the broader community, as indicated by tracking data and anecdotal references to WAI materials.

Deliverables

EOWG primarily develops "WAI Resources" that are stable, vetted pages on the WAI website. EOWG may publish W3C Working Group Notes during this charter period. The Working Group will contribute to and deliver the following resources:

Understanding WCAG 2.1

Work with the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AG WG) in developing Understanding support material for new WCAG 2.1 success criteria.

Update, revise, and redesign EOWG resources

EOWG has reviewed all of its resources and determined the following need updating, revision, and redesign (or retiring):

UI Components List (Editor's Draft)

This resource is a list of user interface (UI) components — widgets, frameworks, snippets, and themes — that claim to meet W3C accessibility guidelines. The Components Project Page links to Requirements Analysis, including Use Cases. EOWG previously approved most of the user interface, yet additional work is needed for improved quality and expectation management.

Outreach

Develop and implement specific outreach campaigns and materials, including around WCAG 2.1, ARIA 1.1, and the next generation of accessibility standards ("Silver").

Develop material to support others throughout the community in their outreach efforts.

Translations Framework

Work plan:

  • Design the user interface for easy visibility of and access to translations of each WAI resource page.
  • Develop a framework for reviewing and listing translations of WAI resource pages.
  • Update Translating WAI Documents.
  • Encourage translations of WAI resource pages.
Web Accessibility Laws and Policies

Update with new data and issues slated for post-launch enhancements: Policies issues in GitHub.

Easy Checks - A First Review of Web Accessibility

This resource provides simple steps to help assess if a web page addresses accessibility. This revision includes:

  • Expanding filtering functionality to improve usefulness and usability, and make the resource shorter for most users.
  • Updating content.

More information is in the Easy Checks Next Generation definition/requirements.

Editorial guidance and support for editors

Develop editorial guidelines to better support more people developing and revising Understanding WCAG, Tutorials, and other EOWG resources. This will be an expansion of EOWG's minimal Style guidance. EOWG envisions that individuals, organizations, and other W3C groups may be interested in bringing material through EOWG to be reviewed, refined, and published as EOWG resources on the WAI website.

Additional Work

EOWG will continue to advise on redesign of the overall WAI website, and revision of WAI website pages.

If projects are defined and editor resources are available, EOWG may also develop:

EOWG work priorities are evaluated regularly by EOWG and WAI staff. Work priorities are periodically revised based on current education and outreach needs, and the progress of deliverables in other WAI Working Groups with which EOWG has dependencies. Therefore, the priority of deliverables listed above are subject to change based on changed circumstances, and timelines below may be adjusted. Updated deliverable schedule and work status will be available on the EOWG Current Projects page.

Timeline

Timeline of major deliverables:

  • December 2017: First priority EOWG Resources revised for redesigned WAI website
  • March 2018: UI Components List completed
  • June 2018: Second priority EOWG Resources revised
  • December 2018: Outreach-related resources and materials complete; outreach plans completed
  • March 2019: Easy Checks revision completed
  • December 2019: All EOWG Resources revised (or retired)
  • June 2020: Tutorials, developer guides, other teaching material
  • Ongoing: Understanding WCAG 2.1 is scheduled to be published with WCAG 2.1 in 2018 Q1 or Q2, and will be continually updated

Resource priorities are listed in the 2017 Charter Work section of the EOWG Current Projects page.

Coordination

Coordination with the following Groups will be made, per the W3C Process Document:

W3C Groups

Accessibility Guidelines Working Group
Coordinate on developing Understanding WCAG documents for new WCAG 2.1 success criteria, on other support material for WCAG 2.1, and on development of future accessibility guidelines.
Publishing@W3C Groups
Coordinate on adding coverage of publishing issues in EOWG Resources, and on education and outreach around W3C Publishing work.
WAI Interest Group
Coordinate on reviewing EOWG Resources, and on gathering input for additional education and outreach support material.
Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) Working Group
Coordinate on understandability, approachability, and ease-of-use of ARIA support resources.
Accessible Platform Architectures (APA) Working Group
Coordinate on understandability, approachability, and ease-of-use of Working Group Notes.
Internationalization Groups
Coordinate one internationalization issues in EOWG Resources, and on user interface for translations of EOWG Resources.

Participation

To be successful, this Working Group is expected to have 10 or more active participants for its duration. Chairs and resource Editors are expected to contribute at least 8 hours per week towards the Working Group. Active participants are expected to contribute 4 hours per week.

The group encourages questions, comments and issues on its public mailing lists and document repositories, as described in Communication.

The group also welcomes non-Members to contribute technical submissions for consideration upon their agreement to the terms of the W3C Patent Policy.

Communication

Discussions for this Working Group are conducted in public: the meeting minutes from teleconference and face-to-face meetings will be archived for public review, and discussions and issue tracking will be conducted in a manner that can be both read and written to by the general public. Working Drafts and Editor's Drafts will be developed on a public repository, and will permit direct public contribution requests. The meetings themselves are not open to public participation, however.

Information about the group (including details about deliverables, issues, actions, status, participants, and meetings) will be available from the Education and Outreach Working Group home page.

This group primarily conducts its work through GitHub, surveys, and teleconferences, and occasionally uses wiki and the e-mail list w3c-wai-eo@w3.org (archive) for communication. The public is invited to review, discuss, and contribute to this work through GitHub and mailing lists.

The group may use a Member-confidential mailing list for administrative purposes and, at the discretion of the Chairs and members of the group, for member-only discussions in special cases when a participant requests such a discussion.

Decision Policy

This group will seek to make decisions through consensus and due process, per the W3C Process Document (section 3.3). Typically, an editor or other participant makes an initial proposal, which is then refined in discussion with members of the group and other reviewers, and consensus emerges with little formal voting being required.

However, if a decision is necessary for timely progress, but consensus is not achieved after careful consideration of the range of views presented, the Chairs may call for a group vote, and record a decision along with any objections.

To afford asynchronous decisions and organizational deliberation, any resolution (including publication decisions) taken in a face-to-face meeting or teleconference will be considered provisional. All resolutions will be announced for review (usually via web-based survey and/or email), with a response period from 3 to 10 working days, depending on the chair's evaluation of the group consensus on the issue. If no objections are raised on the survey or mailing list by the end of the response period, the resolution will be considered to have consensus as a resolution of the Working Group.

All decisions made by the group should be considered resolved unless and until new information becomes available, or unless reopened at the discretion of the Chairs or the Director.

This charter is written in accordance with the W3C Process Document (Section 3.4, Votes), and includes no voting procedures beyond what the Process Document requires.

Patent Disclosures

The Working Group provides an opportunity to share perspectives on the topic addressed by this charter. W3C reminds Working Group participants of their obligation to comply with patent disclosure obligations as set out in Section 6 of the W3C Patent Policy. While the Working Group does not produce Recommendation-track documents, when Working Group participants review Recommendation-track specifications from Working Groups, the patent disclosure obligations do apply. For more information about disclosure obligations for this group, please see the W3C Patent Policy Implementation.

Licensing

This Working Group will use the W3C Document License for some of its deliverables, and for deliverables that are intended to be modified, it will use a more clearly permissive Creative Commons license (CC example) or the W3C Software and Document License.

About this Charter

This charter has been created according to section 5.2 of the Process Document. In the event of a conflict between this document or the provisions of any charter and the W3C Process, the W3C Process shall take precedence.

This section lists important changes in this charter; the rationale for the changes is in the Introduction, per the W3C Process Document (section 5.2.3).

EOWG's previous charters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. The EOWG is renewing its charter in order to continue developing education and outreach resources supporting web accessibility. The main changes since the previous charter are:

  • Shift focus from developing many new resources to updating, revising, and redesigning existing EOWG resources.
  • Develop Understanding WCAG 2.1 support material with AG WG.
  • More support for translations and others to do education and outreach.