The W4A started as a workshop located at the World Wide Web Conference in 2004 founded by Simon Harper, Yeliz Yesilada, and Carole Goble all from the University of Manchester. In 2007 the workshop moved to a full conference, co-located with the Web Conference and moving with it, having the full support of the IW3C2. Additionally in 2007 the W4A Web Accessibility Challenge was started and run by Chieko Asakawa and Hironobu Takagi both of IBM Tokyo. In 2009 Microsoft committed to support the challenge until 2012; and we inaugurated the John M Slatin Award for Best Communication Paper.

Previous editions have been very successful, all papers were reviewed by three of our programme committee and we accepted an average of around 33% of the submissions. We welcome around 70 attendees to each conference from a diverse set of companies ranging from the Governors of the US Federal Reserve to Healthcare Trusts and car manufacturers. We publish an ISBN'ed ACM proceedings and various Special Issues of respected journals within the field. Finally, the conference findings are published in the `ACM ACCESS Computers and Accessibility'. We also solicit sponsorship directly from IBM Research, Mozilla Foundation, Google, Adobe, and the like.