New W3C Working Group

W3C has launc

hed a new working group called Indie UI. This group is part of the WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) and it is dedicated to the development of event models for Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that facilitate the interaction in Web applications that are input method independent, and hence accessible to people with disabilities.

This group will develop a set of events to represent user intent in interaction with Web applications, regardless of device-specific interaction. These events allow the use of alternate input devices such as assistive technologies, while providing a simple model for authors to develop interaction for a wide array of devices. These capabilities are critical for accessibility, and they also benefit mainstream users.

The types of actions that can be represented in this model are those prevalent among GUI and Web applications at this time, such as scrolling the view, canceling an action, changing the value of a user input widget, selecting a range, placing focus on an object, etc. These are basic user interface gestures that are common to most platforms but are actuated in various ways depending on hardware features, system design, and user interaction modality, yet via Indie UI can be exposed in a simple and universal manner to Web applications.