Technical and Communication Papers

Technical papers should have a clear and well-defined technical/scientific contribution, preferably evaluated with the target population. Communication papers may include shorter and more focused contributions, such as work in progress, experience reports from researchers and practitioners, and late-breaking works. In the interest of reproducibility, authors are encouraged, where possible, to share their code and/or data as a supplementary material accompanying their submission.

Both technical papers and communications should be in full paper format: maximum 10-pages (without references) for technical papers or maximum 4-pages (without references) for communication papers. This includes all figures and tables; over-length or incorrectly formatted submissions may be rejected without reviews. Authors should submit their papers in PDF format and include the corresponding source file(s) (Word or LaTeX, see Templates section).

Accepted papers will appear in the conference proceedings which are accessible to the general public via the ACM Digital Library website. The official language of the Conference is English and accepted papers require at least one author to attend to present the work. All submissions will be peer-reviewed by the members of the program committee. Submissions MUST contain substantial original, unpublished material. Please refer to the ACM policy on plagiarism for guidance.

Papers will not be blinded – In this way, we encourage a degree of self-policing: submissions are not blinded, therefore submitting immature work, to be read by a program committee populated by the field’s top researchers, will tarnish your reputation.

Templates

Authors using Word: please use the interim-layout. You may download a PDF example of the Word template.

Authors using LaTeX: please use the “sample-sigconf.tex” template. Please see instructions under the ‘LaTeX Authors’ section.

The ACM LaTeX template on Overleaf platform is also available to all ACM authors.

Please also take into account the General Writing Guidelines for Technology and People with Disabilities.

Authors using Microsoft Word, please note:

The W4A Organization Committee has identified some accessibility issues in the ACM Word template. Unfortunately, we are not in the position to make any changes to make it fully accessible. The reason is that modifying the original template could interfere with the new ACM Publishing System (TAPS) that we are required to comply with in order to publish the Conference Proceedings.

We therefore encourage authors and PC members using assistive technology to check the following tips:

  • The ACM Word template has a two-column format. In order to get the correct reading order, users of screen readers such as JAWS or NVDA are advised to use Microsoft Word keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+Down / Ctrl+Up to move to next/previous paragraphs.
  • The ACM Word template features ACM-generated heading styles instead of Word’s default heading styles. ACM styles can be copied when positioned on the relevant element using Ctrl+Shift+C and pasted on a selected element using Ctrl+Shift+V. A sequence of all heading levels ready to be copied and pasted for authoring purposes can be found in the template by performing a simple search of the text “Sequence of Headings” (section 2 in the Word template).

We hope that the above will improve the overall user experience. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this might cause to authors and PC members. If you need further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact the PC chairs at pc2021@w4a.info.

Accessibility is Required

To avoid delays in approving your submissions, or to avoid potentially being rejected, ensure your paper submission has been created with accessibility fully addressed. The template above provides as much accessibility as possible within the template, but it is important to ensure the content added to it is also as accessible as possible. The following guide is provided to help you with creating a paper that will be accessible when it is saved as a PDF file for submission:

Converting Word to Accessible PDF

Submissions

Please submit your paper (source file(s), paper in PDF format and supplementary materials, if any) via the OpenConf system.

Contact

If you have any questions relating to the submission process, please email pc2021@w4a.info.