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W4A 2013 - Call for papers - The 10th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility

for

From: giorgio brajnik
Date: Jan 23, 2013 7:52AM

Please consider submitting your work, and maybe participate to the
Paciello Group Web Accessibility Challenge or to the Google Student Awards.

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

The 10th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility

W4A 2013 (use #w4a13)

Co-Located with the 21th International World Wide Web Conference,
WWW2013
13-15th May 2013 - Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
http://www.w4a.info/2013/

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

Theme: Bring Your Own Device!

Topics and Content
-------------------------------------

The WHO defines disability as "a complex phenomenon, reflecting an
interaction between features of a person's body and features of the
society in which he or she lives". Web Accessibility should address
this interaction aspect of "disability" so that a wide range of
problems are tackled. While the need for and usage of assistive
technologies may raise barriers that hinder the perception, the
understanding, and the operation of the Web, other barriers may be
caused by technological and situational impairments; think, for
example, of people with low vision that use a tablet rather than an
interactive board or a desktop.

Depending on the device used, the range of barriers being faced may
vary. One could use assistive technologies to enhance the
capabilities of a PC, a tablet or a smartphone; but one could also
rely on desktop browsers on very large screens, interactive TVs, Web
kiosks, gaming consoles, Web browsers in cars or gym equipment,
interactive boards, tangible and natural user interfaces, or more
esoteric devices. Due to particular interaction modalities, access to
information or interactive services may be hindered or even prevented;
due to the quantity and richness of information and services, ability
to process information may be reduced; due to infrastructure (e.g.,
cellular networks in under-developed lands), certain services may
become unusable; due to contingent factors, everybody can become
situationally impaired; due to cultural or language differences,
emotional or language barriers may ensue. In each of these situations,
decoupling user interfaces from backend services could enhance
interoperability both for people who rely on assistive technologies
and those who don't, improving the quality of the experience
regardless of one's own devices.

We welcome therefore papers that explore these issues and their
technological or methodological counterparts in the context of the
Web, papers that assess solutions, that show similarities or
differences between approaches, or that evaluate and compare methods
and tools. As a result, topics of interests include (but are not
limited to):

- Accessibility-related issues of using one's own devices
- Developing accessible user interfaces for different devices
- Coping with different interaction modalities
- 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
------------------------------------
- Dr. Ed H. Chi - Staff Research Scientist at Google Inc.
- Prof. Clayton Lewis - National Institute on Disability and
Rehabilitation Research
See biographies and details at http://www.w4a.info/2013/keynotes/ .

The Paciello Group Web Accessibility Challenge
-------------------------------------
The Sixth "Web Accessibility Challenge" is organized 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 as end-users. To encourage and accelerate development of
innovative and practically usable Web accessibility technologies, the
Challenge is one part of the conference in which new experimental
systems and technologies are submitted, compared, and judged by our
independent panel of experts as to the most significant advance in
research technology in accessibility for that year. Find more details
at http://www.w4a.info/2013/submissions/challenge

Google Student Awards
-------------------------------------
The W4A 2013 Organising Committee are delighted to announce that two
awards, each of up to US$1200 (including registration), are available
to support students to enable them to attend W4A 2013. We now invite
applications with a deadline of February 15th, 2013. The Third
"Student Awards Programme" is organised to give an opportunity to
high quality students with limited funding to attend the W4A
Conference. Our deadlines have been chosen to give as much time as
possible to allow successful applicants to make their travel and
accommodation arrangements. Students with interests related to this
year's topic are encouraged but it is certainly not a requirement as
all students with an interest in accessibility technologies are
welcome to apply. Find more details at
http://www.w4a.info/2013/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/2013/submissions

Important Dates
-------------------------------------
All Submissions Close (Midnight Hawaii Standard Time):
15-Feb-2013

Author Rebuttal Period Ends (Midnight Hawaii Standard Time):
08-Mar-2013

All Decisions:
20-Mar-2013

All Final Versions:
27-Mar-2013

General Chairs ( <EMAIL REMOVED> )
-------------------------------------
Giorgio Brajnik, University of Udine (Italy) Paola Salomoni, University of
Bologna (Italy)

Programme Chairs ( <EMAIL REMOVED> )
-------------------------------------
Jeffrey P. Bigham, University of Rochester (USA) Yevgen Borodin, Stony Brook
University (USA)

Paciello Group Challenge Chairs ( <EMAIL REMOVED> )
-------------------------------------
Greg Gay, OCAD University (Canada)
Silvia Mirri, University of Bologna (Italy)

Google Student Award ( <EMAIL REMOVED> )
-------------------------------------
Tiago Guerreiro, University of Lisbon, (Portugal) Peter Thiessen, eBuddy,
(Netherlands)

Crazy Wednesday ( <EMAIL REMOVED> )
-------------------------------------
Markel Vigo, University of Manchester (UK) Julio Abascal, UPV/EHU (Spain)

Programme Committee
-------------------------------------
- Shadi Abou-Zahra (W3C)
- Faisal Ahmed (NetApp)
- Margherita Antona (ICS-FORTH)
- Myriam Arrue (University of the Basque Country)
- Chieko Asakawa (IBM Research)
- Jennison Asuncion (Adaptech Research Network)
- Sina Bahram (North Carolina State University)
- Armando Barreto (Florida International University)
- Andy Brown (University of Manchester)
- Anna Cavender (University of Washington)
- Luís Carriço (University of Lisbon)
- Michael Cooper (W3C)
- Olga De Troyer (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
- David Duce (Oxford Brookes University)
- Ruslan Fayzrakhmanov (Institute of Information Systems, TU Wien)
- Kelly Ford (Microsoft Inc.)
- Renata Fortes (University of Sao Paulo)
- Vicki Hanson (University of Dundee)
- 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)
- Ravi Kuber (University of Maryland, Baltimore County)
- Arun Kumar (IBM India)
- Jonathan Lazar (Towson University)
- Rui Lopes (University of Lisbon)
- Darren Lunn (University of Manchester)
- Katherine McCoy (University of Delaware)
- Charles McCathieNevile (Yandex)
- Eleni Michailidou (Cyprus University of Technology)
- David Novick (The University of Texas at El Paso)
- Zeljko Obrenovic (Technical University Eindhoven)
- Mike Paciello (The Paciello Group)
- Oscar Pastor (Universidad Politécnica de Valencia)
- Enrico Pontelli (New Mexico State University)
- David Sloan (University of Dundee)
- Hironobu Takagi (IBM Research)
- Shari Trewin (IBM T.J. Watson Research Center)
- Victor Tsaran (Paypal)
- Douglas Tudhope (University of Glamorgan)
- Konstantinos Votis (Centre for Research and Technology Hellas)
- Annalu Waller (University of Dundee)
- Takayuki Watanabe (Tokyo Woman's Christian University)
- Yeliz Yesilada (METU NCC/University of Manchester)

W4A stats
-------------------------------------
As of January 2013 average downloads per article at the ACM Digital Library
is 424 and average citations per article is 3.58.
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
-------------------------------------
Main site: http://www.w4a.info
RSS/ATOM News Feed: http://www.w4a.info/updates.xml
Blog: http://www.w4a.info/2013/blog

Endorsement
-------------------------------------
This year's 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 The Paciello Group, and the
Student Awards are sponsored by a Google.

DO NOT BE DETERRED!
While 'Bring your own device!' 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.

--

Giorgio Brajnik
Dip. di Matematica e Informatica | voice: +39 (0432) 55.8445
Università di Udine | fax: +39 (0432) 55.8499
Via delle Scienze, 206 | email: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Loc. Rizzi -- 33100 Udine -- ITALY | http://www.dimi.uniud.it/giorgio