W3C Web Accessibility Initiative receives renewed Ford Foundation support

https://www.w3.org/ – 25 June 2026 – The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is honored to announce that the Ford Foundation has renewed their support of our work on web accessibility.

The Ford Foundation has approved the renewal of a grant focused on the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). The $1,050,000 USD grant will provide funding over a three-year period beginning August 1, 2026, continuing the work funded under a grant that started in 2024.

The Ford Foundation Technology and Society program works to ensure that digital platforms and emerging technologies are designed and governed to advance justice, protect rights, and dismantle systemic inequalities.

W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) develops strategies, standards, and supporting resources to help make the web accessible to people with a diverse range of cognitive, hearing, movement, sight, and speech ability, thus enabling everyone to participate equally on the web.

Web accessibility also benefits those who are impacted by the digital divide: people with low or expensive bandwidth or with older equipment as well as people with low literacy or even elderly users. Web accessibility benefits mobile phone users as well, which is now 62.73% of all global web traffic with 5.78 billion smart phone users globally. Web accessibility is about reducing barriers to communication and connection and its benefits for individuals extend throughout society and across the globe.

This continued generous support, will strengthen the next generation of WAI accessibility standards and learning resources that will address evolving contexts and powerful new technologies.

W3C is committed to developing open and royalty-free standards with high focus on interoperability and collective empowerment. The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) is a key aspect of W3C’s work to enable a web that connects and empowers humanity. Web accessibility provides people with disabilities greater agency and is vital to engaging effectively and equitably with digital technologies, information, services and institutions – all the touch points of modern social, business and democratic life. Web accessibility is key for full and equal participation in all aspects of society.

About the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

The mission of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is to make the web work — for everyone. W3C offers a unique platform for creating and maintaining a broad range of technical standards and guidelines that enable a World Wide Web which connects and empowers humanity.

W3C convenes hundreds of member organizations, thousands of dedicated technologists and the broad global community, who together shape the future of web technologies, advancing the benefits that accessibility, internationalization, security, and privacy bring to the web and everyone who uses it.

W3C standards enable people and businesses on the web to address society’s social, cultural and economic needs by ensuring an open, accessible, and interoperable web. Some examples are WCAG, SVG, WebRTC, and HTML and CSS, two of the foundational technologies upon which websites are built.

W3C’s work is created in the open and provided for free under the groundbreaking W3C Patent Policy that ensures web standards can be implemented and used widely without complex licensing or costly royalties, which in turn helps to foster open development, and supports the web's growth as a common global infrastructure for all.

W3C is a public-interest, non-profit organization incorporated in the United States of America, led by a Board of Directors and employing a global staff. W3C is funded through Member dues as well as donations, sponsorships, and grants. Supporting us makes a huge difference to our operations and helps W3C to achieve its vision. For more information, see https://www.w3.org/.

End Press Release

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