Reflections from TPAC 2026

TPAC is W3C's yearly work week. A large part of the Working Groups and all sorts of committees get together to collaborate in person (mostly hybrid). This post has some things I got out of it this year.

Some of my week had been slightly overbooked, as is the faith of most TPAC attendees. There is so much going on! Like last year, FOMO was had.

Accessibility

I spent some time with the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AGWG), which is primarily focused on developing WCAG 3. I missed the retrospective, but particularly liked the discussions on the impact of accessibility supported (it is not exact science, but has helped move on from “accessible in theory” to “accessible in actual people's browsers/devices/AT”), and how we can write and scope supplemental-to-WCAG guidance for policy makers and regulators.

I also attended some of the ATAG Community Group, which is getting ready to charter as a Working Group. I am particularly excited about that, as I strongly believe we can and should use CMSes and other authoring tools as a way to achieve accessibility at scale. Your CMS is an accessibility assistant), we can find opportunities to fix issues while we create them. ATAG is being modernised, and the next version will address how people work today: sometimes that's content creation with AI (maybe not great for readers?), content improvement with AI (yay fancy spell checkers and tone of voice improvers), sometimes it is doing accessibility better (yay suggested text alternatives or captions).

W3C and Policy

Following on from last year's successful policy lunch, this TPAC Tara organised a session specifically for policy makers. It was held under Chatham House Rule, and closed door. I gave a short talk about how active standards participation benefits (my team at) the Dutch government. Great questions were asked and discussed.

AI and society

One central theme at TPAC 2026 was the intersection of Web and AI. Broad consensus emerged to form a new Agentic Web Working Group and there were lots of breakout sessions on AI.

Me, Tzviya and Christian ran the “AI and Society mini workshop”: 9 short talks + discussions spread over 2 hours. In it, we looked at AI and the web through in the context of the Ethical Web Principles and the W3C Vision. We're working on a proper report about it. I loved hosting this and hearing all these different angles. I was a little sad we didn't get to use airhorner.com, as we had severely threatened all speakers that we would, were they to exceed their allotted 5 minute slot.

An AI policy for W3C

Last year, me and Elena wrote Use of LLMs in standards work, which the Advisory Board (AB) published as its first “position paper”. It wasn't perfect, but it was nice to publicly share a reflection of the AB's thinking at that point in time. We got useful feedback and ideas.

This year, the W3C Team build onto our paper to create a policy on the use of AI tools. We discussed it during a breakout at TPAC. Personally, I was thrilled with Team's work: it nicely removed some of the imperfections of our position paper, and turned our “advice” into something only Team can do: an actual policy for the community. Thoughtful, succinct, and reasonable, I hope it will get adopted before too long.

Furthering human rights

Me and Dan ran a session on standards and human rights (the ones defined in the Universal Declaration, that is very widely adopted). This session was to share and get feedback about our AB position paper Further Aligning W3C's Program of Technical Work with Human Rights. In that paper, we tried to put the OHCHR report on human rights and technical standards into practical W3C-relevant recommendations (see slides).

Since that position paper, a community group was formed (you can join it if you want to help us move forward), and it was great to get feedback at TPAC on how to turn this into something helpful and sensible. We talked about how this work could fit in with existing things like horizontal review, and the Equity CG's in progress equity maturity model, and discussed ideas like a “Societal impacts” section in specifications. It was clear we need to work on how exactly this work complements other things.

More stuff

I did not manage to attend the main Sustainability Web Interest Group (SWING) meeting due to overlaps, but had great quality time with people from that group, including the shared enjoyment of traditional Irish music (shoutout Chris Adams for organising) and somewhat questionable but not terrible late night snacks.

We also had two AB meetings to ensure we were aligned on what sort of feedback to collect (start of week) and to reflect (end of the week), and used the opportunity to meet the TAG. And we managed to deliberate in person with the current ongoing W3C Council—again, great to have that opportunity to chat in person.

Summary

I'm sure every single attendee had a different week, even if we intersected all the time. I really enjoyed mine. It was another excellently organised event, thanks to everyone involved from W3C Team, and all the friendly people that were in attendance.