About the NRHM

The New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia is an ISI Thompson Indexed
journal published by Taylor & Francis that provides a focus for
research and a source of information on practical and theoretical
developments in hypermedia, hypertext, interactive multimedia and
related technologies. These highly innovative systems allow the
integration of images, sound, text and data to form powerful tools for
information retrieval; by linking multimedia with mass storage, they
can provide users with a more diverse and richly textured information
environment.

The New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia covers the following key
themes: the conceptual basis of hypertext systems; cognitive aspects;
design strategies; intelligent and adaptive hypermedia; automatic
authoring; personalisation, knowledge organisation systems and
services; the semantic web; Web 2.0; link metrics; link dynamics; time
and synchronisation; multimedia authoring tools; navigation and
browsing; search systems; content-based retrieval; studies of
information seeking behaviour; testing and evaluation; user
interfaces; multi-modal interaction; experience design; web
accessibility; physical hypermedia; virtual environments; literary and
creative hypermedia; applications in e-learning, information
management, digital libraries, social networking, publishing,
commerce, the professions and public administration.

The New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia appears in both print and
digital format. http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/13614568.asp

Reviewing Process

All papers will be peer reviewed by W4A reviewers, experts in the
field, and in consultation with the Editor-in-Chief of NRHM.

Special Issue Editor
Leo Ferres
Universidad de Concepción, Concepción, Chile

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.

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

Full Programme with Abstracts
-------------------
http://www.w4a.info/2011/programme/index.shtml

Keynote Speakers
------------------------------------
Manish Gupta, Director at IBM Research (India) and Chief Technologist at IBM India (South Asia)
Bebo White, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) - "William Loughborough After Dinner Keynote"

Registration
-------------------
http://www.w4a.info/2011/logistics/registration.shtml

Social Media
-------------------
We encourage use of the tag #w4a11 for references to W4A 2011 on
Twitter and other social networking web sites. Presentations will be
tagged with the same tag and available on Slideshare afterwards.

Topics and Content
-------------------------------------
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?

Microsoft Web Accessibility Challenge
-------------------------------------
Sponsored by Microsoft since 2008, the "Web Accessibility Challenge"
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. More details:
http://www.w4a.info/2011/submissions/challenge.shtml

Endorsement & Sponsors
-------------------------------------
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.

General Chair (gc-2011-at-w4a.info)
-------------------------------------
Leo Ferres, Universidad de Concepcion, Chile

Programme Chairs (pc-2011@w4a.info)
-------------------------------------
Julio Abascal, University of the Basque Country, Spain
Markel Vigo, University of Manchester, UK

Challenge Chairs (cc2011@w4a.info)
-------------------------------------
Rui Lopes, University of Lisbon, Portugal
Paola Salomoni, University of Bologna, Italy

W4A stats
-------------------------------------
Average downloads per article at the ACM Digital Library is 448 and average citations per article 2.85. To see the stats check the ACM Digital Library site for the W4A conference at http://portal.acm.org/event.cfm?id=RE143

W4A on the Web
-------------------
http://www.w4a.info
http://www.w4a.info/updates.xml (RSS/ATOM News Feed)

• Standard (after 28-Feb-2011)
• Student: $300
• Non-Student: $400

Monday, 28 March
08:45–09:00	Opening
09:00–10:00	Keynote
10:00–10:30	Google Student Awards
10:30–11:00	Coffee Break
11:00–12:30	Evaluating accessibility
12:30–14:00	Lunch Break
14:00–15:30	Adaptation and profiling for accessibility
15:30–16:00	Coffee Break
16:00–17:00	Innovative techniques and studies
19:00–21:00	'William Loughborough' After Dinner Speech
Tuesday, 29 March
09:00–10:30	Engineering and designing web accessibility
10:30–11:00	Coffee break
11:00–12:30	Microsoft Web Accessibility Challenge
12:30–14:00	Lunch break
14:00–15:30	Accessing to rich and dynamic content
15:30–16:00	Coffee break
16:00–16:30	Closing and awards

Or have a look at the Full Programme.

All finish at Midnight Hawaii Standard Time.

31-Jan-2011 CHALLENGE SUBMISSIONS CLOSE
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 Salomini (University of Bologna, Italy)

The 8th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A 2011)

http://www.w4a.info

Co-Located with the 20th International World Wide Web Conference, WWW2011
in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, India, 28-29 March 2011

===========================================================================================

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

Topics and Content
-------------------------------------
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

While cloud computing and crowdsourcing are this year's 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.

Microsoft Web Accessibility Challenge
-------------------------------------
Sponsored by Microsoft since 2008, the "Web Accessibility Challenge"
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. More details:
http://www.w4a.info/2011/submissions/challenge.shtml

Submission
-------------------------------------
We will accept position and technical papers, and short
communications. Position papers should only be submitted as a
communication of (up to 4-pages) whereas technical papers should be in
full paper format (up to 10-pages). Accepted papers and communications
will appear in the Conference proceedings contained on the Conference
CD, and will also be accessible to the general public via the ACM
Digital Library website. The official language of the Conference is
English.

Submission details are available at:
http://www.w4a.info/2011/submissions/index.shtml

Important Dates
-------------------------------------
Technical and Communication Papers:
10 Jan 2011 (Midnight Hawaii Standard Time)

Web Accessibility Challenge:
31 Jan 2011 (Midnight Hawaii Standard Time)

Decision:
07 Feb 2011 (Midnight Hawaii Standard Time)

More details: http://www.w4a.info/2011/submissions/dates.shtml

Publications
-------------------------------------
The conference proceedings will be published as part of the ACM
International Conference Proceedings Series and will be available at
the ACM Digital Library. Selected authors will be invited to submit
extended versions of their paper for publication in a Journal to be
announced.

Keynote Speakers
------------------------------------
Manish Gupta, Director at IBM Research (India) and Chief Technologist at IBM India (South Asia)
Bebo White, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) - "William Loughborough Dinner Keynote"

Google Student Awards
-------------------------------------
The Second "Student Awards Programme", sponsored since 2010 by Google,
is organised to give an opportunity to high quality students with
limited funding to attend the W4A Conference. Thanks to generous
sponsorship from Google, two awards, each of up to US$1200, are
available to support students to attend W4A 2011. We now invite
applications from interested students.

http://www.w4a.info/2011/submissions/studentawards.shtml

Endorsement
-------------------------------------
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.

General Chair (gc-2011-at-w4a.info)
-------------------------------------
Leo Ferres, Universidad de Concepcion, Chile

Programme Chairs (pc-2011@w4a.info)
-------------------------------------
Julio Abascal, University of the Basque Country, Spain
Markel Vigo, CICtourGUNE, Spain

Challenge Chairs (cc2011@w4a.info)
-------------------------------------
Rui Lopes, University of Lisbon, Portugal
Paola Salomoni, University of Bologna, Italy

Student Awards (students2011@w4a.info)
-------------------------------------
Jeffrey P. Bigham, University of Rochester, USA
Yevgen Borodin, Stony Brook University, USA

Programme Committee
-------------------------------------
Shadi Abou-Zahra, W3C
Margherita Antona, ICS-FORTH
Helen Ashman, The University of South Australia
Myriam Arrue, University of the Basque Country
Melanie Baljko, York University
Armando Barreto, Florida International University
Yevgen Borodin, Stony Brook University
Giorgio Brajnik, Universitˆ di Udine
Andy Brown, University of Manchester
Anna Cavender, University of Washington
Wendy Chisholm, University of Washington
Olga De Troyer, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
David Duce, Oxford Brookes University
Inmaculada Fajardo, University of Valencia
Kelly Ford, Microsoft Inc.
Renata Fortes, University of Sao Paulo
Greg Gay, University of Toronto
Becky Gibson, IBM Emerging Internet Technologies
Simon Harper, University of Manchester
Sarah Horton, Dartmouth College
Matt Huenerfauth, City University of New York
Caroline Jay, University of Manchester
Brian Kelly, UKOLN, University of Bath
Arun Kumar, IBM India
Rui Lopes, University of Lisbon
Katherine McCoy, University of Delaware
Eleni Michailidou, University of Manchester
Klaus Miesenberger, University of Linz
David Novick, The University of Texas at El Paso
Zeljko Obrenovic, Technical University Eindhoven
Mike Paciello, The Paciello Group
Oscar Pastor, Universidad PolitŽcnica de Valencia
Enrico Pontelli, New Mexico State University
IV Ramakrishnan, Stony Brook University
Gustavo Rossi, Universidad Nacional de La Plata
Paola Salomoni, University of Bologna
Andrew Sears, UMBC
Cynthia Shelly, Microsoft Corporation
David Sloan, University of Dundee
Hironobu Takagi, IBM Research Tokyo
Shari Trewin, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Douglas Tudhope, University of Glamorgan
Konstantinos Votis, Centre for Research and Technology Hellas
Annalu Waller, University of Dundee
Takayuki Watanabe, Tokyo Woman's Christian University
Yeliz Yesilada, METU NCC/University of Manchester

W4A stats
-------------------------------------
Average downloads per article at the ACM Digital Library is 434 and average citations per article 2.38. To see the stats check the ACM Digital Library site for the W4A conference at http://portal.acm.org/event.cfm?id=RE143&CFID=112729227&CFTOKEN=66814088

o Early Bird (before 28-Feb-2011; inclusive)
o Student: $250
o Non-Student: $350

o Standard (after 28-Feb-2011)
o Student: $300
o Non-Student: $400

The top two papers for citations are:

1. Vigo, Markel and Arrue, Myriam and Brajnik, Giorgio and Lomuscio, Raffaella and Abascal, Julio (2007). Quantitative metrics for measuring web accessibility Proceedings of the 2007 international cross-disciplinary conference on Web accessibility, 1 (1), 99-107 : 10.1145/1243441.1243465
2. Bigham, Jeffrey P. and Ladner, Richard E. (2007). Accessmonkey: a collaborative scripting framework for web users and developers Proceedings of the 2007 international cross-disciplinary conference on Web accessibility , 1 (1), 25-34 : 10.1145/1243441.1243452

These figures and the Microsoft Academic Search Conference Trajectory show the W4A to be a conference in the ascendency and an increasingly important place to publish work!

Publication years 2004-2010
Publication count 157
Citation Count 374
Available for download 154
Downloads (6 Weeks) 2,000
Downloads (12 Months) 15,627
Downloads (cumulative) 66,917
Average downloads per article 434.53
Average citations per article 2.38

Co-Located with the 20th International World Wide Web Conference, WWW2011
in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, India, 28-29 March 2011

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

Topics and Content
-------------------------------------
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

While cloud computing and crowdsourcing are this year's 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.

Microsoft Web Accessibility Challenge
-------------------------------------
Sponsored by Microsoft since 2008, the "Web Accessibility Challenge"
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. More details:
http://www.w4a.info/2011/submissions/challenge.shtml

Submission
-------------------------------------
We will accept position and technical papers, and short
communications. Position papers should only be submitted as a
communication of (up to 4-pages) whereas technical papers should be in
full paper format (up to 10-pages). Accepted papers and communications
will appear in the Conference proceedings contained on the Conference
CD, and will also be accessible to the general public via the ACM
Digital Library website. The official language of the Conference is
English.

Submission details are available at:
http://www.w4a.info/2011/submissions/index.shtml

Important Dates
-------------------------------------
SUBMISSIONS:

TECHNICAL and COMMUNICATION Papers:
10 Jan 2011 (Midnight Hawaii Standard Time)

WEB ACCESSIBILITY CHALLENGE:
31 Jan 2011 (Midnight Hawaii Standard Time)

DECISION:
07 Feb 2011 (Midnight Hawaii Standard Time)

More details: http://www.w4a.info/2011/submissions/dates.shtml

Publications
-------------------------------------
The conference proceedings will be published as part of the ACM
International Conference Proceedings Series and will be available at
the ACM Digital Library. Selected authors will be invited to submit
extended versions of their paper for publication in a Journal to be
announced.

Keynote Speakers
------------------------------------
Manish Gupta, Director at IBM Research (India) and Chief Technologist at IBM India (South Asia)
Bebo White, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) - "William Loughborough Dinner Keynote"

Google Student Awards
-------------------------------------
The Second "Student Awards Programme", sponsored since 2010 by Google,
is organised to give an opportunity to high quality students with
limited funding to attend the W4A Conference. Thanks to generous
sponsorship from Google, two awards, each of up to US$1200, are
available to support students to attend W4A 2011. We now invite
applications from interested students.

http://www.w4a.info/2011/submissions/studentawards.shtml

Endorsement
-------------------------------------
W4A 2011 is endorsed by the International World Wide Web Conferences
Steering Committee (IW3C2)

General Chair (gc-2011-at-w4a.info)
-------------------------------------
Leo Ferres, Universidad de Concepcion, Chile

Programme Chairs (pc-2011@w4a.info)
-------------------------------------
Julio Abascal, University of the Basque Country, Spain
Markel Vigo, CICtourGUNE, Spain

Challenge Chairs (cc2011@w4a.info)
-------------------------------------
Rui Lopes, University of Lisbon, Portugal
Paola Salomoni, University of Bologna, Italy

Student Awards (students2011@w4a.info)
-------------------------------------
Jeffrey P. Bigham, University of Rochester, USA
Yevgen Borodin, Stony Brook University, USA

Programme Committee
-------------------------------------
Shadi Abou-Zahra, W3C
Margherita Antona, ICS-FORTH
Helen Ashman, The University of South Australia
Myriam Arrue, University of the Basque Country
Melanie Baljko, York University
Armando Barreto, Florida International University
Yevgen Borodin, Stony Brook University
Giorgio Brajnik, Universitˆ di Udine
Andy Brown, University of Manchester
Anna Cavender, University of Washington
Wendy Chisholm, University of Washington
Olga De Troyer, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
David Duce, Oxford Brookes University
Inmaculada Fajardo, University of Valencia
Kelly Ford, Microsoft Inc.
Renata Fortes, University of Sao Paulo
Greg Gay, University of Toronto
Becky Gibson, IBM Emerging Internet Technologies
Simon Harper, University of Manchester
Sarah Horton, Dartmouth College
Matt Huenerfauth, City University of New York
Caroline Jay, University of Manchester
Brian Kelly, UKOLN, University of Bath
Arun Kumar, IBM India
Rui Lopes, University of Lisbon
Katherine McCoy, University of Delaware
Eleni Michailidou, University of Manchester
Klaus Miesenberger, University of Linz
David Novick, The University of Texas at El Paso
Zeljko Obrenovic, Technical University Eindhoven
Mike Paciello, The Paciello Group
Oscar Pastor, Universidad PolitŽcnica de Valencia
Enrico Pontelli, New Mexico State University
IV Ramakrishnan, Stony Brook University
Gustavo Rossi, Universidad Nacional de La Plata
Paola Salomoni, University of Bologna
Andrew Sears, UMBC
Cynthia Shelly, Microsoft Corporation
David Sloan, University of Dundee
Hironobu Takagi, IBM Research Tokyo
Shari Trewin, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Douglas Tudhope, University of Glamorgan
Konstantinos Votis, Centre for Research and Technology Hellas
Annalu Waller, University of Dundee
Takayuki Watanabe, Tokyo Woman's Christian University
Yeliz Yesilada, METU NCC/University of Manchester

W4A on the Web
-------------------------------------
http://www.w4a.info
RSS/ATOM News Feed http://www.w4a.info/updates.xml

There are 2 awards of $1200 each to pay for travel and accommodation.

This year we are also please to name IBM Research as conference sponsor too!

This is all great news for the conference as we get underway!

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

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?