#1284: Incubation: Web Haptics API

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Opened Sep 24, 2026

Explainer

https://github.com/WICG/web-haptics/blob/main/readme.md

The explainer

Where and by whom is the work is being done?

Requesting an early pre-spec design review.

  • GitHub repo: https://github.com/WICG/web-haptics/
  • Primary contacts:
    • Alex Kyereboah (@kyerebo), Microsoft, Engineer
    • Limin Zhu (@liminzhu), Microsoft, PM
  • Organization/project driving the design: Microsoft
  • This work is being funded by: Microsoft
  • Incubation and standards groups that have discussed the design:
  • Standards group(s) that you expect to discuss and/or adopt this work when it's ready: WICG for the imperative API, CSSWG for the declarative API.

Feedback so far

  • Multi-stakeholder feedback:

    • Chromium comments: We are proposing the feature.
    • Mozilla comments: No spec exists yet, no position requested.
    • WebKit comments: No spec exists yet, no position requested.

  • Major unresolved issues with or opposition to this design:

    • The declarative API (CSS) is in-between two designs currently, the @haptic rule or the event-trigger model.

You should also know that...

The declarative API could use direction on which model would be the most appropriate, but the imperative API is more straight-forward and is currently receiving direct developer testing.

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Discussions

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Comment by @christianliebel Oct 22, 2026 (See Github)

Hi @kyerebo, thanks for your proposal. The first thing we noticed is that your section on “Accessibility, Privacy, and Security Considerations” does not yet include accessibility considerations, although we believe this proposal might touch on accessibility. Could you please add those? I’m marking this issue as “Missing: security & privacy review” for lack of a better-fitting label for now.

Comment by @kyerebo Oct 26, 2026 (See Github)

Hi @christianliebel ! Thanks for the heads up. I've added an Accessibility section to the Explainer. Haptics is meant as supplementary feedback, and it's possible that a request doesn't produce an outcome due to it being unsupported. It shouldn't be relied on as an indicator for any interaction or final state, and uncomfortable vibration is managed by UA anti-abuse tools such as throttling or origin gating.