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Following the Workshop on Internationalizing the Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML), W3C announces new work to extend SSML to Asian and other languages and to add speaker verification. Speaker verification is "the best biometric for securing telephone transactions and communications," said Ken Rehor (Vocalocity) Chairman of the VoiceXML Forum and participant in the W3C Voice Browser Working Group.

© W3C: Janet Daly, Marie-Claire Forgue, Yasuyuki Hirakawa

The W3C Web Services Addressing Working Group will hold an Interoperability Event on 17-18 January in Vancouver, BC Canada. Participants will test the Web Services Addressing family of W3C specifications. The group invites interested parties who have implemented Web Services Addressing 1.0: Core, SOAP Binding and/or WSDL Binding.

© W3C: Mark Nottingham

W3C announces the renewal of the Quality Assurance Activity and the QA Interest Group, chaired by Karl Dubost (W3C) and Lynne Rosenthal (NIST). The main objective of the QA Interest Group (QA IG) is to provide a venue for W3C, its Membership, and the Web community to share their experiences and involvement with QA. Participation is open to W3C Members and the public.

© W3C: Karl Dubost, Dominique Hazaël-Massieux

The RDF Data Access Working Group has released an updated Working Draft of the SPARQL Query Language for RDF. SPARQL (pronounced "sparkle") offers developers and end users a way to write and to consume search results across a wide range of information such as personal data, social networks and metadata about digital artifacts like music and images. SPARQL also provides a means of integration over disparate sources.

© W3C: Eric Prud'hommeaux, Andy Seaborne

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group has released Working Drafts of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 and HTML Techniques for WCAG 2.0 and a First Public Working Draft of Understanding WCAG 2.0. Following WCAG makes Web content more accessible to the vast majority of users, including people with disabilities and older users, using many different devices including a wide variety of assistive technology.

© W3C: Ben Caldwell, Wendy Chisholm, John Slatin, Gregg Vanderheiden

The Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines Working Group has released a Working Draft of Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 incorporating Last Call comments. The guidelines are written to help developers create accessible authoring interfaces that produce accessible Web content. Resulting content can be read by a broader range of readers including those with disabilities.

© W3C: Jutta Treviranus, Jan Richards, Matt May

The WAI Protocols and Formats Working Group has released Inaccessibility of CAPTCHA: Alternatives to Visual Turing Tests on the Web as a Working Group Note. Requests for visual verification of a bitmapped image pose problems for those who are blind, have low vision or have a learning disability such as dyslexia. The note examines ways for systems to test for human users while preserving access for users with disabilities.

© W3C: Matt May

W3C announces the launch of the Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group (HCLSIG). Chaired by Tonya Hongsermeier (Partners HealthCare) and Eric Neumann (Unaffiliated), the group is chartered to improve collaboration, research and development, and innovation adoption in the health care and life science industries. Aiding decision-making in clinical research, Semantic Web technologies will bridge many forms of biological and medical information across institutions.

© W3C: Eric Miller, Tonya Hongsermeier, Eric Neumann, Brian Gilman

The Internationalization Tag Set Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of the Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) and an updated Working Draft of its requirements. Organized by data categories, this set of elements and attributes supports the internationalization and localization of schemas and documents. Implementations are provided for DTDs, XML Schema and Relax NG, and for existing vocabularies like XHTML, DocBook and OpenDocument.

© W3C: Christian Lieske, Felix Sasaki

W3C launches the W3C Feed Validation Service, a free online tool open to creators of syndication feeds in formats such as RSS and Atom. Based on feedvalidator, and adding a SOAP Web service interface for interactive programming, the tool is useful for automatic or batch syntax checking. This service joins the existing pool of free, open source tools offered by W3C to the Web development community to help build a better World Wide Web.

© W3C qa-dev group