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  I'm doing a 5 minute talk at the yearly conference of the Netherlands Standardisation Forum next week, on where human rights and standards meet. Five minutes is very short, but long enough to get across that standardisation can indeed impact human rights, in good and bad ways.

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  From release notes of LibreOffice 26.8: ”[It] contains no generative AI features. Documents are not transmitted to remote services for processing (…). This is a deliberate position.” https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/08/26/libreoffice-26-8/

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  W3C technical work often impacts or even helps realise human rights. Today, the @ab@w3c.social published a position statement on more things W3C can do to consider human rights in our standards work, which I co-authored with @torgo@mastodon.social. https://www.w3.org/TR/furthering-human-rights/

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  🔗 From today, EU regulation around labeling AI generated content goes into effect. The Commission provides icons that can be used https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-icons-labelling-ai-generated-content

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  Now that WCAG-EM 2 is out, I did some more PRs: - to update the docs on the WAI website (https://github.com/w3c/wai-website/pull/2102) - to update the WCAG-EM Report Tool with the new terminology (https://github.com/w3c/wai-wcag-em-report-tool/pull/300) Thanks @w3c@w3c.social for making this stuff so easy to contribute to, and yay open source!

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  📣 Today is the day: WCAG-EM 2 is officially out as a W3C Note! What's new? 1. the name; it's now “WCAG Evaluation Methodology” (was: Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology) 2. it's no longer about websites 3. it's about 'digital products' (of which websites and apps are examples) improved readability (uses most recent W3C template) 4. up to date examples, illustrations, etc (eg I removed jQuery and Dojo references, and added things about design systems...

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  Very pleased to see that AGWG, aka the W3C group that makes WCAG, decided to publish WCAG-EM 2, an update to the WCAG evaluation methodology that me, @SteveFaulkner@mastodon.social and Jeroen worked on for the past year https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl/2026JulSep/0034.html In The Netherlands it powers our 9k+ website government monitoring dashboard, that governmental orgs of all levels submit WCAG-EM based reports to.

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  Artist on YouTube video: “London, sing this shit together!” YouTube's AI subtitles: “London, sing this [__] together!” This is what I mean when I say AI tools embed values that may or may not be our own. People who use subtitles can handle the word “shit” just like everyone else.

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  “the MMAGA companies” — @robin@mastodon.social #PubConf2026

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  we have a Forgejo instance at the Dutch government now and it's great! A lot of the UI is actually smoother and faster than GitHub, there's no annoying upselling, no forced AI ('are you sure you don't want this reviewed by an agent?'), and the fact that we run rather than rent it seems optimal strategically. Thanks @Gina@fosstodon.org and co for making it possible 👏

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  I shared Important Research™️ indicating 95% of people (globally) have something interesting to say. To blog, to make music, to excite us all with what they can uniquely bring. Meanwhile, merely 5% of all people know how to post content on their own websites. We need easier ways to publish on the web!

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  dogfooding my own advice: so this message went on the Fediverse first, then on the Atmosphere, and then on LinkedIn.

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  Reminder that also if you work at a large org, you can convince folks to get rid of the X posting and the X links. European Commission removed X in favour of Mastodon https://eupolicy.social/@hpod16/116538344713848285

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  I've now heard many examples of companies that actively make AI token usage part of perf reviews. In some, you could perform otherwise perfectly, but fail to get promoted without token usage. So people are building systems just for the sole purpose of burning tokens. Normal or utter bollocks?

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  🔗 Another reason to disallow LLM contributions in open source projects would be that it gets in the way of the project nurturing “new, confident, trustworthy contributors“, says (even) Simon Willison https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/30/zig-anti-ai/ (via @xgranade)

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  Just did a guest lecture on AI and web standards for policy makers. Thanks @lolaodelola for the invite! slides and links: https://talks.hiddedevries.nl/JrJus9/ai-web-and-standards

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  My friends at web agency Level Level repeated their ecommerce accessibility study from last year, checking how accessible the top 15 Dutch ecommerce sites are. They used a pragmatic, process-based approach to score the sites (eg “can I order”, “can I log in”, “can I pay” etc) In almost half of them, you can only purchase stuff if you are able to use a mouse. https://level-level.com/accessibility-in-e-commerce-there-is-still-much-to-be-done/

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  “Microsoft and other US tech companies successfully lobbied the EU to hide the environmental toll of their datacentres” When I say in public talks that big tech keeps data centre usage secret, I worry about being perceived as a complot theorist, but yeah they actually do this. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/17/microsoft-us-tech-firms-lobbied-eu-secrecy-rules-datacentre-emissions

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  Today I'm presenting a talk at the Ministry of the Interior about AI and ethics. more nerves than usual but I'l try and be reasonable and also not uncritical

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  I am auditing this very large and pretty complex website this week and it's excellent to see how much the team got right. Feels like they read WCAG and tested with users.

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  Will anyone here attend the Digital Summit tomorrow? https://netwerkdigitalesamenleving.groenlinks.nl/programma-digital-summit Excited to meet like-minded folks! Me and @digihobbit will give a talk about the Web Sustainability Guidelines

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  “Humans aren't perfect either therefore my imperfect LLM usage is fine” is an argument I've been hearing more lately. What'd your response be, humans of Mastodon?

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  Downside of attending a conference outside the well-regulated continent of Europe is that no laws protect you from unsolicited spam emails. 🙃 #GDPRFTW