All finish at Midnight Hawaii Standard Time.
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!):
This years W4A is endorsed by the IW3C2 in cooperation with the ACM and its Special Interest Groups SIGWEB and SIGCHI. The general conference is supported by IBM Research, Microsoft, and Google, while the Web Accessibility Challenge is specifically sponsored by Microsoft, and the Student Awards are specifically sponsored by a Google.
You can also find us indexed in the ACM DL and DBLP, and on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Lanyrd, Flickr, SlideShare, and Interaction-design.org.
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.
