Responsibility

As Programme Chair your responsibility is to select the Programme Committee (PC) and invite each member - we have a list of previous members and pro-forma invites - new members are added to this list at the discretion of the Programme Chair, after the conference based on their performance. The Programme Chair may also invite members who are not directly Web Accessibility experts but are experts with relation to the Theme of the Conference for that particular year - these would not normally be added to the master PC list. You should forward the current editions PC to the W4A organisers for the website.

See Mark Bernstein's excellent 'Reviewing Conference Papers' for how to review and why it needs to be a high quality activity. In addition, you should familiarise yourself with our submission policy so that you can make your reviews as high a quality as possible.

You should become familiar with, and then administer, the OpenConf conference submission system. The W4A organisers can help with questions on this aspect. Manage the review process (the Conference Submission System automates all of these) including submissions, reviewer sign-up and allocation, for-review assignments and distributions, chasing reviews and late reviews, process the accepts, rejects, and communication invites - accepts / rejects / communications are your decision based on the reviews. Maintaining plagiarism checks, and maintain paper quality to 35% for technical paper submissions. Papers not deemed to be of Technical Quality but with scientific merit will be invited to submit a Communication Paper. Camera Ready Copies are not your responsibility get the authors to send these directly to operations

You should forward a list of Accepted authors to the W4A organisers for cross-checking against registrations. Forward any Visa Requests to ops@w4a.info.

You should suggest Best Paper candidates - forward these to the PC, moderate the discussion, then choose the Best Paper. And forward this information to the W4A organisers. Suggest Keynote speakers to the General Chair (GC) (the conference normally has 1 per day). The GC will provide the session times, the Programme Chair will schedule each paper into the available time allocation - 30 minutes (20+10) for technical papers and 20 minutes (15+5) for communications. Assemble the programme for the Web-site / Digital Library / and Paper Proceedings and forward this to the W4A organisers. Collaborate with the GC on the Proceedings introductory text. The generic Introduction and Closing presentations should be modified for each year. These are in the operational area of the site, and should be modified in plenty of time before the conference starts. In these sessions, it must be explicit who says what and when (i.e what does the GC say, what does the PC say, what does the Challenge Chair say).

You must also present the Best Paper Prize to the winners; at the conference. There is a balance between the 'surprise' element of giving best paper awards, and making sure the recipients will be there. The GC should decide whether to tell prizewinners in advance so that they are present at the ceremony. In addition, the GC should start the conference report process (with the Programme Chair) so that it is complete by the end of June of the year of the conference.

Additionally, the Research Highlights venue within CACM is designed to take interesting articles from other venues and repackage them for the broader community that is reached by CACM. The goal is to highlight interesting research results that people may not otherwise hear about. One of the roles that SIGACCESS plays is to recommend articles relevant to the SIG's area of emphasis to the editors of the CACM Research Highlights venue. The reality is that most of the articles they recommend will not be featured, but they believe this is an important opportunity to get accessibility research in front of the broader computing community. In fact, the recent cover story (August 2009) on "A blind person's interaction with technology" was originally nominated for the Research Highlights column. They have been working to identify both venues and a process for this effort. W4A is one of the conferences they have identified as a likely source of appropriate articles. They now deal with the W4A using an ongoing nomination process to leverage the knowledge and experience of our Chairs when identifying articles that may be nominated. In this case the PC should identify up to four articles (but we should supply less if the quality of the other papers are not high enough) each time W4A takes place that you believe may be appropriate for the Research Highlights column. Please note the expectations outlined below:

"Papers should be of the highest quality, representing significant breakthroughs in a particular subfield of computer science, and should be of interest to readers outside that subfield. (Authors will have the opportunity to rewrite the paper for a general audience.) Simply being the best paper in a particular conference does not qualify a paper for the Research Highlights section; it needs to contains ideas and results that people outside the subfield should care about. Publishing a CACM RH article does not prevent the authors from publishing a fully fleshed out version of the paper in an appropriate journal."

Once you have identified articles that you believe may be appropriate, forward the relevant details to the Vice Chair of SIGACCESS (vc_sigaccess@acm.org). At that point, the SIG will do an additional review (considering CACM objectives as well as articles the SIG has nominated from other venues), generate nomination materials, and will submit the nominations.

Finally, the Programme Chair should add any Comments / Words of Wisdom / Suggested Procedural Changes / etc for the next Chair to this page.

The W4A conference is gratis; however flights and accommodation (and other expenses) are not paid.

Timeline 2011

All dates are the target FINISH dates.

• 31-Jul-2010 GC/PC - Secure Day 1 Keynote (inform Operations for Website)
• 31-Jul-2010 GC/PC - Secure Day 2 Keynote (inform Operations for Website)
• 31-Jul-2010 GC/PC/CC - Create Call Email Text (Send to Operations)
• 30-Sep-2010 PC - Invite and Fix Review Committee (inform Operations for Website)
• 31-Nov-2010 GC/PC/CC - Create Second (Updated) General Call (Send to Operations)
• 31-Nov-2010 PC - Populate Topics and Open Submission System for Reviewer and Advocate Signup
• 31-Nov-2010 PC - Open Submission System for Author Submissions


• 07-Jan-2011 PC - CLOSE SUBMISSIONS - Assign Technical / Communication Reviews and Inform Reviewers
• 08-Jan-2011 PC - Remind Reviewers
• 15-Jan-2011 PC - REVIEW PERIOD ENDS - Open Rebuttal Period and Inform Authors
• 22-Jan-2011 PC - AUTHOR REBUTTAL ENDS - Close Rebuttal Period and Inform Reviewers
• 01-Feb-2011 PC - REVIEWER RESPONSES ENDS - Close Response Period and Inform Advocates
• 05-Feb-2011 PC - ADVOCATE PERIOD ENDS - Advocate Decisions and Discussions with Reviewers
• 08-Feb-2011 PC - DECISIONS - All Technical / Communication Papers


• 09-Feb-2011 GC/PC - Decide on Technical and Communications Awards (Forward Details to Operations)
• 20-Feb-2011 GC/PC/CC - Create Programme Including Proceedings Introduction
• 30-Mar-2011 PC - Email Reviewers/Advocates Thanks
• 30-Jun-2011 GC/PC/CC - Prepare ACM Final Conference Report