Jeff Jaffe, CEO of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), to Deliver Keynote at the 2018 M-Enabling Summit

BETHESDA, MD (February 21, 2018) —

The organizers of the 2018 M-Enabling Summit are pleased to announce that Dr. Jeff Jaffe, CEO of the
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), will be delivering the opening morning keynote of the 2018 M-Enabling Summit on June 12, 2018. W3C, as the global standards organization that develops foundational Web technologies such as HTML, CSS, SVG and XML, plays a leading role in the promotion of digital accessibility around the world through its Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), now adopted as an ISO standard serving as leading digital accessibility reference for 163 countries.

Jeff Jaffe’s keynote will be of high interest to the participants in the 7th M-Enabling Summit as W3C is updating its Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to address more mobile, low vision, and cognitive accessibility needs. These user needs are critically important to independent living for people with disabilities, the 2018 M-Enabling Summit theme. Additionally, in 2017 W3C completed its merger with the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), with a vision to align Publishing and Web technologies with accessibility embedded at its core.

Under Jeff’s leadership, W3C has continued ensuring that accessibility is addressed within all areas of W3C’s work, including work to make online videos more accessible with captions and subtitles, for which W3C received a 2016 Emmy® Award. W3C has begun standards work on the Web of Things to reduce IoT fragmentation, potentially benefitting services supporting seniors and persons with disabilities – and taking advantage of W3C’s Open Web platform. Web & Virtual Reality (VR) are also on the agenda of the W3C, highlighting the need for ever more bandwidth to enable accessible VR applications to fully leverage the Web platform, another area of innovation of high interest to M-Enabling Summit participants.

“Jeff’s keynote could not be timelier: while W3C contributions under Jeff’s leadership in advancing digital accessibility around the world have already been considerable, W3C’s expanded areas of focus open even more opportunities for technologies in support of independent living for persons with disabilities,” said Axel Leblois, President of G3ict, co-organizer of the M-Enabling Summit. 

Dr. Jeffrey Jaffe became the W3C CEO on 8 March 2010. Before joining W3C, Jeff served in several leadership positions in the information technology industry including as Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for Novell, President of Bell Labs Research and Advanced Technologies, Chairman of the board of the New Jersey Nanotechnology Consortium and early in his career, after receiving a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT in 1979, in a variety of technical and management positions at IBM including at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

For more information on registering for the M-Enabling Summit, please visit http://www.m-enabling.com

To view the agenda, click here.