W4A2012 Call for Papers

Apologies for cross-posting.

=======================   Call for Papers  ====================================

               The 9th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility

                                                W4A 2012 (use #w4a12)               
                         				 
          Co-Located with the 21th International World Wide Web Conference, WWW2012 
                                        in Lyon, France, 16-17 April 2012                     

                                               http://www.w4a.info/2012/

=========================================================================

Theme: The Web of Data and Web Accessibility


Topics and Content
-------------------------------------
The World Wide Web has changed the way we search, access, consume and produce information. While 
existing superficial content allows us to browse and interact with the Web, we are far from taking full 
advantage of it. Laying beneath the surface of the Web there are a number of phenomena such as trends 
and patterns in information structure and in user behaviour that do shape the way we communicate, 
consume and browse. As far as accessibility is concerned, Web content plays a central role in an ecosystem
where user agents, authoring tools, crowd-sourcing frameworks and testing tools determine how accessible
is the Web. As these components are moving to the cloud, their mere activity and interplay produces 
large amounts of data. For instance, thousands of testing reports are being generated every day by 
automatic tools and auditors. Moreover, crowd-sourcing tools are facilitating a myriad of accessibility 
fixes and providing guidance to users.

In parallel, announcements made by UK and US governments, amongst others, to make public data 
available are contributing to adding enormous amounts of data to the Web. While some of these data 
repositories consist of raw data, some other are explicitly structured and semantically annotated set 
of documents. However, users still find it difficult to access to these data mainly because of information 
overload and access barriers. So even if the major goal of Open Government initiatives is to foster 
transparency, the reality is that citizens struggle to access.

So we can find data produced by the accessibility ecosystem -users and tools- and intentionally uploaded 
data. The former, if adequately exploited, can yield invaluable knowledge to better understand web 
accessibility as a phenomenon. The latter provide us mechanisms to arrange these data on the web so 
that they are accessible for machines although not for humans. As a result, topics of interests include 
(but are not limited to):

* Intelligent processing of the massively produced reports by accessibility testing tools.
* Web mining and AI techniques for accessibility testing and repairing.
* Usage patterns of accessibility tools on the cloud.
* How to use data produced by means of crowd-sourcing accessibility fixes.
* How data produced while interacting and traversing the Web can improve accessibility.
* How to create user profiles from log data.
* The characterization of the Web at a macro and micro-scale.
* Accessibility of Linked Data repositories.
* Using Linked Data to better organise knowledge on Web accessibility.
* Web authoring guidelines and tools
* Mobile accessibility
* User modeling and the adaptive web
* Adaptation and transformation of existing Web content
* 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
* Accessible graphic formats and tools for their creation

Keynote Speakers
------------------------------------
- Professor James Hendler, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
- Professor Alan Newell, University of Dundee, "William Loughborough Dinner Keynote" sponsored by SIGWEB

Microsoft 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. Find more details at 
http://www.w4a.info/2012/submissions/challenge

Google Student Awards
-------------------------------------
The Second "Student Awards Programme", sponsored since 2010 by Google,
is organised to give an opportunity to high quality students with
limited funding to attend the W4A Conference. Thanks to generous
sponsorship from Google, two awards, each of up to US$1200, are
available to support students to attend W4A 2012. We now invite
applications from interested students. Find more details at
http://www.w4a.info/2012/submissions/student-awards

Submissions
-------------------------------------
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). The official language of the Conference is
English. Submission details are available at: http://www.w4a.info/2012/submissions


Important Dates
-------------------------------------
All Submissions Close (Midnight Hawaii Standard Time)
04-Feb-2012

Author Rebuttal Period Ends (Midnight Hawaii Standard Time)
18-Feb-2012 

All Decisions
28-Feb-2012 

All Final Versions
16-Mar-2012 

More details: http://www.w4a.info/2012/submissions/important-dates


General Chairs (gc2012@w4a.info) 
-------------------------------------
Julio Abascal, University of the Basque Country, Spain
Markel Vigo, University of Manchester, UK

Programme Chairs (pc2012@w4a.info)
-------------------------------------
Rui Lopes, University of Lisbon, Portugal
Paola Salomoni, University of Bologna, Italy

Challenge Chairs (cc2012@w4a.info)
-------------------------------------
Jeffrey Bigham, University of Rochester, USA
Eugene Borodin, SUNY, USA

Google Student Award (students2012@w4a.info)
-------------------------------------
Anna Cavender, Google
Shari Trewin, IBM Research

Special Issue (si2012@w4a.info)
-------------------------------------
Chieko Asakawa, IBM Japan
Hironobu Takagi, IBM Japan

Advocates
-------------------------------------
Tiago Guerreiro, Technical University of Lisbon (Portugal)
Shaun K Kane, UMBC (USA)
Sergio Sayago, University of Dundee (UK)
Peter Thiessen, eBuddy (Netherlands)

Programme Committee
-------------------------------------
Shadi Abou-Zahra (W3C)
Margherita Antona (ICS-FORTH)
Myriam Arrue (University of the Basque Country)
Melanie Baljko (York University, Canada)
Armando Barreto (Florida International University)
Giorgio Brajnik (Università di Udine)
Andy Brown (University of Manchester)
Luís Carriço (University of Lisbon)
Olga De Troyer (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
David Duce (Oxford Brookes University)
Inmaculada Fajardo (University of Valencia)
Renata Fortes (University of Sao Paulo)
Greg Gay (University of Toronto)
Becky Gibson (IBM Emerging Internet Technologies)
Simon Harper (University of Manchester)
Sarah Horton (Author and Consultant)
Matt Huenerfauth (City University of New York)
Caroline Jay (University of Manchester)
Brian Kelly (University of Bath)
Arun Kumar (IBM India)
Katherine McCoy (University of Delaware)
Eleni Michailidou (The Cyprus University of Technology)
Klaus Miesenberger (University of Linz)
Silvia Mirri (University of Bologna)
David Novick (The University of Texas at El Paso)
Zeljko Obrenovic (Technical University Eindhoven)
Mike Paciello (The Paciello Group)
Enrico Pontelli (New Mexico State University)
IV Ramakrishnan (Stony Brook University)
Gustavo Rossi (Universidad Nacional de La Plata)
Cynthia Shelly (Microsoft Corporation)
David Sloan (University of Dundee)
Hironobu Takagi (IBM Research)
Shari Trewin (IBM T.J. Watson Research Center)
Douglas Tudhope (University of Glamorgan)
Konstantinos Votis (Centre for Research and Technology Hellas)
Takayuki Watanabe (Tokyo Woman’s Christian University)
Yeliz Yesilada (METU NCC/University of Manchester)


Publications
-------------------------------------
Accepted papers and communications will appear in the Conference proceedings
contained on the Conference USB key, and will also be accessible to the general 
public via the ACM Digital Library website. Selected authors will be invited 
to submit extended versions of their paper for publication the International 
Journal of Universal Access in the Information Society (UAIS) 
http://www.springer.com/computer/hci/journal/10209. In 2011,
UAIS journal was accepted by ISI. The journal will be indexed from 2009 and 
it will receive an Impact Factor for 2011. The Impact Factor for this year will be 
released in June 2012.


W4A stats
-------------------------------------
As of December 2011 average downloads per article at the ACM Digital Library is 424 and average 
citations per article is 2.89. 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
-------------------------------------
http://www.w4a.info
RSS/ATOM News Feed: http://www.w4a.info/updates.xml 
Blog: http://www.w4a.info/2012/blog

Endorsement
-------------------------------------
This years W4A is endorsed by the IW3C2 in cooperation with the ACM and its 
Special Interest Groups SIGACCESS, SIGWEB and SIGCHI. The Web Accessibility 
Challenge is sponsored by Microsoft, and the Student Awards are sponsored by a Google.

DON’T BE DETERRED!
While 'The Web of Data' is this years 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.

Received on Friday, 2 December 2011 14:48:14 UTC