W4A 2011 - Call for Participation

The 8th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility
                                 
                           W4A 2011 (use #w4a11)               
                          				 
Co-Located with the 20th International World Wide Web Conference, WWW2011 
                in Hyderabad, India, 28-29 March 2011                     

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'Crowdsourcing the Cloud: An Inclusive Web by All and For All?'

Full Programme with Abstracts
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<http://www.w4a.info/2011/programme/index.shtml>

Keynote Speakers
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Manish Gupta, Director at IBM Research (India) and Chief Technologist at IBM India (South Asia)
Bebo White, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) - "William Loughborough After Dinner Keynote"

Registration
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<http://www.w4a.info/2011/logistics/registration.shtml>

Social Media
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We encourage use of the tag #w4a11 for references to W4A 2011 on
Twitter and other social networking web sites. Presentations will be
tagged with the same tag and available on Slideshare afterwards.

Topics and Content
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Cloud-computing is the technological paradigm where computing
resources are distributed over the Internet. This way, the browser
becomes the interface to access services and applications with almost
unlimited storage capacity and processing power. Cloud-computing and
the applications deployed over it facilitate collective intelligence
and crowdsourcing phenomena, where millions of users can contribute to
a common goal. Following these approaches, a number of successful
projects that focus on web accessibility have been released in recent
years. These developments range from platforms to collectively
removing accessibility barriers to making assistive technologies
widespread and available for all. These preliminary approaches such as
online screen-readers and accessibility repairing applications have
yielded promising results towards an inclusive web by removing both
economical and accessibility barriers. In order to develop the cloud
to its full potential as far as accessibility is concerned, there are
still several research questions that should address the weak points
and challenges in a timely manner in order to create an inclusive Web.

Will crowdsourcing the cloud lead us to an inclusive Web by all and
for all? Will crowdsourcing the cloud remove accessibility barriers
for all? Will crowdsourcing the cloud make the Web accessible or
inaccessible?

Microsoft Web Accessibility Challenge
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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/2011/submissions/challenge.shtml

Endorsement & Sponsors
-------------------------------------
This years W4A is endorsed by the IW3C2 in cooperation with the ACM and its Special Interest Groups SIGWEB and SIGCHI. The general conference is supported by IBM Research, Microsoft, and Google, while the Web Accessibility Challenge is specifically sponsored by Microsoft, and the Student Awards are specifically sponsored by a Google.

General Chair (<gc-2011-at-w4a.info>)
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Leo Ferres, Universidad de Concepcion, Chile

Programme Chairs (<pc-2011@w4a.info>)
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Julio Abascal, University of the Basque Country, Spain
Markel Vigo, University of Manchester, UK

Challenge Chairs (<cc2011@w4a.info>)
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Rui Lopes, University of Lisbon, Portugal
Paola Salomoni, University of Bologna, Italy

W4A stats
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Average downloads per article at the ACM Digital Library is 448 and average citations per article 2.85. To see the stats check the ACM Digital Library site for the W4A conference at <http://portal.acm.org/event.cfm?id=RE143>

W4A on the Web
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<http://www.w4a.info>
<http://www.w4a.info/updates.xml> (RSS/ATOM News Feed)

Received on Tuesday, 22 February 2011 21:23:02 UTC