- From: Yeliz Yesilada <yesilady@cs.man.ac.uk>
- Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:04:24 +0200
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
This is the final call for technical and communications papers for the next W4A Conference: 'Developing Regions: Common Goals, Common Problems?'. Papers are due on Monday, February 1, at midnight Hawaii Standard Time. The deadline for the Web Accessibility Challenge is also rapidly approaching. If you are planning to submit to this conference, now is the time. The Seventh International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A 2010) Co-Located with the Nineteenth International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2010), in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, 26-27 April 2010. Important Dates ------------------- * SUBMISSIONS: TECHNICAL and COMMUNICATION Papers: 01 Feb 2010 (Midnight Hawaii Standard Time) WEB ACCESSIBILITY CHALLENGE: 19th Feb 2010 (Midnight Hawaii Standard Time) More details: <http://www.w4a.info/2010/submissions/dates.shtml> Keynote Speakers -------------------------- * Steve Bratt (CEO, WWW Foundation) * Gregg Vanderheiden (Director Trace R&D Center, Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison) This year, we will also have an After Dinner Keynote at the conference dinner. We feel that this more casual environment will allow for an extended discussion among the conference attendees of the topics covered throughout the conference. Our 2010 After Dinner Keynote will be: * William Loughborough (Smith-Kettlewell Institute of Visual Science) Publications ------------------- * The conference proceedings will be published as part of the ACM International Conference Proceedings Series and will be available at the ACM Digital Library. * Authors of selected papers presented at W4A 2010 will be invited to submit revised versions of their papers for publication in a Special Issue of the New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia (NRHM) journal. This follows two previous successful Special Issues of the same journal presenting research from past W4A conferences, and we're pleased to be able to continue our association with the journal. New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia: <http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/13614568.asp> Topics and Content ------------------- A revolution in the information society is now starting, based on the use of mobile phones in developing countries. The hyper-growth of mobile phone penetration is deeply changing the lives of people in most of the world; their ways of communicating, working, learning, and structuring their societies. The promising next step is obviously to access the Web. The Web has already touched the lives of over a billion people and now is the time for the next billions. However, this expansion faces unprecedented accessibility challenges. Even the word "accessibility" needs a new definition for people in the developing regions. How can someone who is illiterate or barely literate access the Web? In some cases, a language may not even have a written form. The affordability of the technology is also a challenge, while access is constrained by low computational power, limited bandwidth, compact keyboards, tiny screens, and even by the lack of electric power. All of these constraints compound the problems of access and inclusion. The desire for access in developing regions and the resourcefulness of the people who want inclusion unite the communities of people in developing regions and the communities of disabled people in the developed world. Will complex and highly graphical interfaces exclude developing regions from access? What problems exist, what are the newly appearing problems, and what solutions are required? How do the adoption patterns for Web accessibility and inclusion vary across cultures? What effect will the Web in the developing regions have on accessibility in the developed regions and vice versa? Note that while the commonalities between Web Accessibility and Developing Regions are this year's theme, please don't be deterred if this somewhat unique area is not yours. We would like to see all quality work on Web Accessibility regardless of the particular field within accessibility. The overriding reason for a paper being accepted is its high quality in relation to the broad area of Web Accessibility. In this case topics of interests include (but are not limited to): * Inclusion and Citizen Empowerment in Developing Regions; * Inclusion and Literacy in Developing Regions; * Enhancing Education in Developing Regions; * Accessibility Problems in Developing Regions; * Web Based Employment in Developing Regions; * Web Based Health Care in Developing Regions; * Evaluation and Validation tools and techniques; * User Experimentation looking at Social Networking and Freedom of Expression; * User Agents for Developing Regions and User Agent Guidelines; * Web Authoring Guidelines; * Design and best practice to support Web accessibility; * Technological advances to support Web accessibility; * End user tools; * Accessibility guidelines, best practice, evaluation techniques, and tools; * Psychology of end user experiences and scenarios; * Innovative techniques to support accessibility; * Universally accessible graphical design approaches; * Design Perspectives; * Adapting existing Web content; and * Accessible graphic formats and tools for their creation. Submission -------------------- We will accept position and technical papers, and short communications. Position papers should only be submitted as a communication of (up to 4-pages) whereas technical papers should be in full paper format (up to 10-pages). Accepted papers and communications will appear in the Conference proceedings contained on the Conference CD, and will also be accessible to the general public via the ACM Digital Library website. The official language of the Conference is English. Submission details are available at: <http://www.w4a.info/2010/submissions/index.shtml> Web Accessibility Challenge ------------------- Sponsored by Microsoft since 2008, the "Web Accessibility Challenge" is organised to give an opportunity to researchers and developers of advanced Web accessibility technologies for showcasing their technologies to technical leaders in this area not only from academia and industry but also from end-users. More details: Http:// www.w4a.info/2010/submissions/challenge.shtml W4A Google Student Awards ------------------- Thanks to financial support from Google, these Awards will provide financial support towards travel and accommodation, plus free conference registration, to two students conducting postgraduate research in the web accessibility field and who otherwise would be unable to attend W4A. We now invite submissions from interested students - the deadline is **Thursday 4th February**, midnight Hawaii Standard Time. More information including details of the submission procedure is available on the W4A Google Student Awards page at: <http://www.w4a.info/2010/submissions/studentawards.shtml> Endorsement ------------------- W4A 2010 is endorsed by the International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee (IW3C2) General Chair ------------------- Chieko Asakawa and Hironobu Takagi Accessibility Research, Tokyo Research Laboratory, IBM Research, Tokyo Japan Email: gc-2010-at-w4a.info Programme Chairs ------------------- Leo Ferres Department of Computer Science, Universidad de Concepción, Chile Cynthia Shelly Microsoft Co. USA Email: pc-2010@w4a.info Challenge Chairs ------------------- Julio Abascal, Myriam Arrue and Markel Vigo UPV/EHU, Spain Special Issue Chair ------------------- David Sloan University of Dundee, UK. Programme Committee ------------------- Margherita Antona, ICS-FORTH, Greece Helen Ashman, The University of South Australia, Australia Armando Barreto, Florida International University, USA Eugene Borodin, Stony Brook University, USA Giorgio Brajnik, Universita di Udine, Italy Andy Brown, University of Manchester, UK Anna Cavender, University of Washington Wendy Chisholm, University of Washington Alan Chuter, ONCE Foundation Michael Cooper, W3C, USA Olga De Troyer, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium David Duce, Oxford Brookes University, UK Kelly Ford, Microsoft, Inc., USA Renata Fortes, University of Sao Paulo, Brasil Becky Gibson, IBM Emerging Internet Technologies, USA Vicki Hanson, University of Dundee, UK Simon Harper, University of Manchester, UK Sarah Horton, Dartmouth College, USA Caroline Jay, University of Manchester, UK Brian Kelly, UKOLN, University of Bath, UK Rui Lopes, University of Lisbon, Portugal Darren Lunn, University of Manchester, UK Charles McCathieNevile, Opera Software Eleni Michailidou, University of Manchester, UK Klaus Miesenberger, University of Linz, Austria David Novick, The University of Texas at El Paso, USA Zeljko Obrenovic, Technical University Eindhoven (TU/e), Netherland Michael Paciello, The Paciello Group, USA Enrico Pontelli, New Mexico State University, USA I.V. Ramakrishnan, State University of New York at Stony Brook, USA Gustavo Rossi, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina Paola Salomoni, University of Bologna, Italy Andrew Sears, UMBC, USA David Sloan, University of Dundee, UK Shari Trewin, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA Victor Tsaran, Yahoo, Inc., USA Douglas Tudhope, University of Glamorgan, UK Takayuki Watanabe, Tokyo Woman's Christian University, Japan Yeliz Yesilada, University of Manchester, UK W4A on the Web ------------------- * <http://www.w4a.info> * <http://www.w4a.info/updates.xml (RSS/ATOM News Feed)>
Received on Wednesday, 27 January 2010 13:08:59 UTC