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

Co-Located with the Twentieth International World Wide Web Conference, in Hyderabad, India.

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?

From this point of view, W4A 2011 is interested in the following topics in particular (but not exclusively!):

• Cloud computing based assistive technologies
• Deployment, acceptance and scalability issues of cloud computing accessibility tools
• Tools for collaborative accessibility testing
• Tools to collectively repair accessibility problems
• Empirical studies and data analysis of crowdsourcing for accessibility
• Cooperative authoring tools
• Quality assurance of crowdsourcing generated content
• Methodologies for crowdsourcing procedures for 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