Timeline 2011

All finish at Midnight Hawaii Standard Time.

• 10-Jan-2011 TECHNICAL and COMMUNICATION SUBMISSIONS CLOSE
• 26-Jan-2011 AUTHOR REBUTTAL PERIOD BEGINS
• 31-Jan-2011 CHALLENGE SUBMISSIONS CLOSE
• 31-Jan-2011 AUTHOR REBUTTAL ENDS
• 07-Feb-2011 DECISIONS - ALL SUBMISSIONS
• 18-Feb-2011 ALL CAMERA READY COPY DUE
• 28-Mar-2011 CONFERENCE DAY 1
• 29-Mar-2011 CONFERENCE DAY 2

The Fourth "Web Accessibility Challenge", sponsored since 2008 by Microsoft, is organised 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. 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.

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.

Don't be Deterred!

While Crowdsourcing the Cloud 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. So remember, submissions related to this year's topic are encouraged but it is certainly not a requirement as all accessibility technologies are welcomed for the challenge.

Submission materials

• Two-page abstract (see the W4A submission page - http://www.w4a.info/2011/submissions/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.

Awards

• 2011 Web Accessibility Challenge: Judges Award Decided by the invited judges, who are experts from academia, industry and end-users.
• 2011 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 (cc2011@w4a.info).

Submission details

• Submissions should be sent to this email address: cc2011@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 "w4a2011" to the movie, and send the URL of the movie to the submission address (cc2011@w4a.info).
• Abstracts and movies should emphasise 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). In reality these presentations are intended to remove the need for the judges to install experimental application code and libraries on their own computers - in this case the technology is judged on its intended use - and so a screen reader for blind users may not have a textual output; in this case captioning the audio would be inappropriate. However, any visual presentation which is not part of the system - ie textual titles - should be audio described, and any audio, such as supplementary narration, should be captioned. In this way nothing is added to the system demonstration contained within the presentation, unless the submitter has augmented their work with additional descriptions etc.
• 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.

Challenge Judges

• Mike Paciello
  (Industry, The Paciello Group)
• Shadi Abou-Zahra
  (Standards, W3c)
• Greg Gay
  (Industry/Research, ATutor/Ontario College of Art & Design)
• Cynthia Shelly
  (Industry, Microsoft)
• Giorgio Brajnik
  (Research, University of Udine)

Contact (cc2011@w4a.info)

• Challenge Co-Chair - Rui Lopes
  University of Lisbon, Portugal.
• Challenge Co-Chair - Paola Salomoni
  University of Bologna, Italy