W4A 2008, Beijing, April 21-22 2008

[christina]

W4A is a coming together of industry and academia to talk about all
things relating to the Web and enhanced access for disabled people - so
covers social and technical approaches. Submissions to the conference a
peer-reviewed, with recent acceptance rates of around 35%, and the
proceedings of the conference are published by the ACM.

This year's conference theme is "One World, One Web: Surfers become
Designers?" where we are keen to explore the impact of Web 2.0 on
disabled people as authors as well as receives of information and
experiences.

W4A 2008 web site - www.w4a.info
WWW 2008 web site - www.www2008.org


W4A 2008, Beijing, April 21-22 2008

*SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS*

Keynote Speakers
--------------------------
* Michael Paciello (The Paciello Group)
* TV Raman (Google)

Important Dates
-------------------
* SUBMISSIONS: TECHNICAL and COMMUNICATION Papers:
Monday 18th Feb 2008 (Midnight Hawaii Standard Time)
* NOTIFICATION: TECHNICAL and COMMUNICATION Papers:
Monday 10th March 2008 (Midnight Hawaii Standard Time)
* CAMERA READY COPY: TECHNICAL and COMMUNICATION Papers:
Monday 24th March 2008 (Midnight Hawaii Standard Time)
* Conference Dates:
Monday 21th and Tuesday 22nd April 2008

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.
* Authors of the best papers will be invited to submit extended versions
to a special issue of New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia (NRHM).

Topics and Content
-------------------
The World Wide Web (Web) is returning to its origins. Surfers are not
just passive readers but content creators. Wikis allow open editing and
access, blogs enable personal expression, Flicker, YouTube, MySpace, and
Facebook encourage social networking by enabling designs to be 'created'
and 'wrapped' around content. Indeed it seems that only the Web
infrastructure supporting expression is immutable and invisible to the
user. Template based tools such as iWeb, Google Page Creator, and
RapidWeaver enable fast professional looking Web site creation using
automated placement, with templates for blogging, picture sharing, and
social networking, these tools often require publishing to a system
specific server, such as '.mac'. In this case we wonder if the
conjugation of authoring tools and user agents represents an opportunity
for automatically generated Web Accessibility or yet another problem for
Web Accessibility? Will form based and highly graphical interfaces
excluded disabled users from creation, expression and social networking?
What problems exist, what are the upcoming problems, what solutions are
required? What about the accessibility of the content designed and
created by surfers? Finally, what effect will this have on the wider
Web? We pose the question: What happens when surfers become authors and
designers?

In this case topics of interests include (but are not limited to):

* Investigations focused on Template Based Technology;
* User Experimentation looking at Social Networking and Freedom of
Expression;
* GUI and Form investigations with regard to access;
* How Wikis and Blogging Tools effect accessibility of content
creation;
* Evaluation and Validation tools and techniques for Wiki and
Blogging tools;
* Web Content Creation Tools;
* Web Authoring Guidelines;
* 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;
* Design Perspectives;
* Adapting existing Web content; and
* Accessible graphic formats and tools for their creation.

The Web Accessibility Challenge
--------------------------------
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. This year, we
would like to focus on the technologies for "one world, one Web".
The W4A 2008 "Web accessibility challenge" aims to gather innovative
accessibility technologies for rich Internet applications, collaboration
services, collective intelligence systems, real-time collaboration
systems, location aware systems, multilingual web sites, local language
input methods and other systems invented for globalization.

For further information on submissions, participation and awards, please
refer to:
http://www.w4a.info/2008/challenge.shtml


Submission
--------------------
We will accept position and technical papers, and short communications.
Position papers should only be submitted as a communication of (upto 4-
pages) whereas technical papers should be in full paper format (upto 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.

LaTeX:
http://www.w4a.info/2008/backingfiles/sig-alternate.cls
http://www.w4a.info/2008/backingfiles/sig-alternate.tex
http://www.w4a.info/2008/backingfiles/sig-alternate.pdf

Notes for LaTeX users:
Ensure your submission is formatted for Letter paper.
All authors should be listed on the front page.

Microsoft Word:
http://www.w4a.info/2008/backingfiles/pubform.doc

More information on the style files and submission procedure can be
found at: http://www.w4a.info/2008/submission.shtml.

Please submit documents via the conference website (http://www.w4a.info/).

Sponsors
-------------------
The Mozilla Foundation (http://www.mozillafoundation.org/)
Google (http://www.google.com)
ACM's Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing (SIGACCESS)
(http://www.acm.org/sigaccess/)
Zakon Group (http://www.zakongroup.com/)

Endorsement
-------------------
W4A 2008 is endorsed by the International World Wide Web Conferences
Steering Committee (IW3C2)

Programme Committee
-------------------
Julio Abascal - University of the Basque Country, Spain.
Margherita Antona - ICS-FORTH, Greece.
Chieko Asakawa - IBM, Japan.
Helen Ashman - The University of South Australia, Australia.
Armando Barreto - Florida International University, USA.
Giorgio Brajnik - Università di Udine, Italy.
Catherine Brys - University of Strathclyde, UK.
Sofia Celic - Vision Australia, Australia.
Michael Cooper - W3C, USA.
David Duce - Oxford Brookes University, UK.
Becky Gibson - IBM Emerging Internet Technologies, USA.
Brian Kelly - UKOLN, UK.
Richard E. Ladner - University of Washington, USA.
Laura Leventhal - Bowling Green State University, USA.
Christina Li - BBC/UIGarden.net, UK.
Zhengjie Liu - Dalian Maritime University, China.
Klaus Miesenberger - University of Linz, Austria.
David G. Novick - The University of Texas at El Paso, USA.
Zeljko Obrenovic - CWI, Netherlands
Helen Petrie - University of York, UK.
Enrico Pontelli - New Mexico State University, USA.
IV Ramakrishnan - State University of New York at Stony Brook, USA.
Gustavo H. Rossi - Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina.
Paola Salomoni - Università di Bologna, Italy.
Andrew Sears - UMBC, USA.
Cynthia Shelly - Microsoft, USA.
Robert Stevens - University of Manchester, UK.
Hironobu Takagi - IBM Research, Japan.
Shari Trewin - IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA.
Olga De Troyer - VUB, Belgium.
Douglas Tudhope - University of Glamorgan, Wales, UK.
Takayuki Watanabe - Tokyo Woman's Christian University, Japan.
Mary Zajicek - Oxford Brookes University, UK.

General Chair
-------------------
Yeliz Yesilada
Information Management Group,
University of Manchester,
MANCHESTER, M13 9PL, UK

Email: gc-2008-at-w4a.info

Programme Chair
-------------------
David Sloan
School of Computing
University of Dundee
DUNDEE, DD1 4HN, UK

Email: pc-2008@w4a.info

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

[eleanor]

Looks interesting Christina. Are you presenting?