The "Web Accessibility Challenge" is organised, and since 2008 sponsored by Microsoft, 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. We would like to encourage and accelerate development of innovative and practically usable Web accessibility technologies. This year, we would like to focus on the technologies for "one world, one Web".

According to the recent globalization trend, the Web is becoming the social infrastructure for the global community. Web 2.0 technologies, such as social networking services, collective intelligence services, and real-time collaboration services, realized various types of global collaboration models, and they are changing the world drastically. This trend requires the web accessibility technology to be evolved to allow anyone to join the global community by making Web 2.0 collaboration services accessible.

This year, the second "Web accessibility challenge" aims to gather innovative accessibility technologies for rich Internet applications, collaboration services, collective intelligence systems, real-time collaboration systems, location aware systems, multilingual web sites, local language input methods and other systems invented for globalization.

Submission materials

• Two-page abstract (see the W4A submission page - http://www.w4a.info/2008/submissions.shtml)
• Demonstration movie (or audio recording) with audio description.
• Software is not required, but encouraged.

Conference attendance

A presentation and demonstration session will be part of the W4A event, so at least one of the authors is required to attend the conference.

Deadlines

Submission deadline is March 3rd 2008 (Midnight Hawaii Standard Time).

Awards

• 2008 Web Accessibility Challenge: Judges Award Decided by the invited judges, who are experts from academia, industry and end-users.
• 2008 Web Accessibility Challenge: Delegates Award Decided by the participants of the conference.
• In addition, you can get feedback from judges and participants.

System requirements

• Any kind of system is acceptable, such as standalone assistive technologies, voice browsers, browser plug-ins, server-based services, and telephony systems. Other accessibility technologies can be accepted (e.g., tactile browser).
• Open source systems are welcomed.
• Please contact us, if you have any questions about the coverage (challenge@w4a.info).

Submission details

• Submissions should be sent to this email address: challenge-submission@w4a.info
• You can also consider alternative methods for submission of large movie files such as uploading the file to YouTube. In this case, please add a tag "w4a2008" to the movie, and send the URL of the movie to the submission address (challenge-submission@w4a.info).
• Abstracts and movies should emphasize the innovative ideas in the system. Do not demonstrate whole functions including usual or average functions.
• The demonstration movies should also be non-visually accessible, since some of referees are blind. Please consider to add audio descriptions to the submission movie, and do not add unnecessary audio (e.g., background music).
• Abstracts should be in ACM/W4A paper format, since abstracts will be published in the proceedings. Abstracts and movies will be stored in the ACM Digital Library.

Contact:

• Hironobu Takagi (IBM Research)
• Takayuki Watanabe (Tokyo Woman's Christian University)
• challenge@w4a.info