The design of human-powered access technology
The proceedings of the 13th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility
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The International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A) was started in 2004 with the aim of accelerating research activities towards an accessible World WideWeb. Through previous conferences, a growing number of participants from academia, industry, government and non-profit organisations around the world have gathered to exchange their latest research results, widen their perspectives through discussions with their peers, and establish future research agendas across disciplines and sectors. Each year, we choose a theme to encourage a focus on the emerging challenges in a particular area of accessibility, and for W4A 2011 we posed the question: "Crowdsourcing the Cloud: An Inclusive Web by All and For All?" Cloud-computing and the applications deployed on the cloud 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? This year, we a had a record of submissions, 6 technical papers and 16 communication papers were selected from 34 submissions through peer review process. As usual, we received submissions from researchers worldwide, spanning Asia, Europe, North America, Oceania and South America. The coverage of submissions was comprehensive across Web accessibility research fields: evaluation and repair, user modeling and adaptive interfaces, access to rich and dynamic content and accessibility engineering, amongst others. Acceptance rate of technical papers was 33%. In addition, we received 9 submissions to The Web Accessibility Challenge event. The acceptance rate as well as the thorough review process led to a high quality number of papers that ensures the excellence of the W4A conference. As of March 2011, each W4A paper has been downloaded 452 times on average and has 2.87 citations according to the ACM Digital Library. These data confirm that W4A does not only provide excellent visibility to papers but also enables strong scientific impact.