The Google Student Awards Program was established in 2010 to allow high-quality students with limited funding to attend the W4A Conference, present their research, and get early feedback from top researchers in the field of Web Accessibility. The focus of this year's competition was on the use of cloud-computing for web accessibility. The Web for All (W4A) 2011 Organizing Committee is happy to introduce the 2011 winners: Vivienne Conway from Australia and Vasile Topac from Romania. Generous support from Google will fund their travel to W4A in Hyderabad, India.

Vivienne Conway

Vivienne Conway is a Ph.D. student in the School of Computer and Security Science at Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia. Her research deals with the intricacies of web accessibility and usability in the context of national conformance to the WCAG 2.0 standard. The Australian Government is in the process of implementing the Web Accessibility National Strategy which will require all government and affiliates to comply with WCAG 2.0 to Priority Level A by December 2012 and AA by December 2014. Those sites not covered by the transition strategy fall within the purview of the Australian Human Rights guideless, which recommend WCAG 2.0 AA as a minimum standard. Vivienne's research assesses the effectiveness of this strategy over the period of its implementation and will contribute to a new framework to assist other organizations in their efforts to build more accessible websites. At the W4A 2011 conference, Vivienne will speak about the current levels of website accessibility in Australia, Australia's transition to WCAG 2.0 compliance, and how her research will work toward an intervention strategy to assist in meeting long-term accessibility targets.

Vasile Topac

Vasile Topac is a PhD student in the Department of Information Technology at Polytechnic University of Timisoara, Romania. His research falls mainly in the area of services for textual information accessibility. He approaches information accessibility in a universal fashion by looking at multiple levels of information access limitations, like physical impairments and language understanding. Within this approach he looks to integrate existing web accessibility services with newly designed ones, and attempts to define useful collaboration models for them. At the W4A 2011 conference he will speak about the benefits of approaching textual information accessibility by looking at multiple layers of access limitation and equivalent solutions. He will present use cases for such an approach and propose useful combinations of web accessibility services.