======================= Preliminary Call for Papers ===========================

The 9th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility

W4A 2012 (use #w4a12)

Co-Located with the 21th International World Wide Web Conference, WWW2012
in Lyon, France, 16-17 April 2012

http://www.w4a.info/2012/

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'The Web of Data and Web Accessibility'

Topics and Content
-------------------------------------
The World Wide Web has changed the way we search, access, consume and produce information. While
existing superficial content allows us to browse and interact with the Web, we are far from taking full
advantage of it. Laying beneath the surface of the Web there are a number of phenomena such as trends
and patterns in information structure and in user behaviour that do shape the way we communicate,
consume and browse. As far as accessibility is concerned, Web content plays a central role in an ecosystem
where user agents, authoring tools, crowd-sourcing frameworks and testing tools determine how accessible
is the Web. As these components are moving to the cloud, their mere activity and interplay produces
large amounts of data. For instance, thousands of testing reports are being generated every day by
automatic tools and auditors. Moreover, crowd-sourcing tools are facilitating a myriad of accessibility
fixes and providing guidance to users.

In parallel, announcements made by UK and US governments, amongst others, to make public data
available are contributing to adding enormous amounts of data to the Web. While some of these data
repositories consist of raw data, some other are explicitly structured and semantically annotated set
of documents. However, users still find it difficult to access to these data mainly because of information
overload and access barriers. So even if the major goal of Open Government initiatives is to foster
transparency, the reality is that citizens struggle to access.

So we can find data produced by the accessibility ecosystem -users and tools- and intentionally uploaded
data. The former, if adequately exploited, can yield invaluable knowledge to better understand web
accessibility as a phenomenon. The latter provide us mechanisms to arrange these data on the web so
that they are accessible for machines although not for humans. As a result, topics of interests include
(but are not limited to):

* Intelligent processing of the massively produced reports by accessibility testing tools.
* Web mining and AI techniques for accessibility testing and repairing.
* Usage patterns of accessibility tools on the cloud.
* How to use data produced by means of crowd-sourcing accessibility fixes.
* How data produced while interacting and traversing the Web can improve accessibility.
* How to create user profiles from log data.
* The characterization of the Web at a macro and micro-scale.
* Accessibility of Linked Data repositories.
* Using Linked Data to better organise knowledge on Web 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

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.

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). The official language of the Conference is
English.

Submission details are available at:
http://www.w4a.info/2012/submissions

Important Dates
-------------------------------------
All Submissions Close (Midnight Hawaii Standard Time)
04-Feb-2012

Author Rebuttal Period Ends (Midnight Hawaii Standard Time)
18-Feb-2012

All Decisions
28-Feb-2012

All Final Versions
16-Mar-2012

More details: http://www.w4a.info/2012/submissions/important-dates

General Chairs
-------------------------------------
Julio Abascal, University of the Basque Country, Spain
Markel Vigo, University of Manchester, UK

Programme Chairs
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Rui Lopes, University of Lisbon, Portugal
Paola Salomoni, University of Bologna, Italy

Challenge Chairs
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Jeffrey Bigham, University of Rochester, USA
Eugene Bodorin, SUNY, USA

Google Student Award
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Anna Cavender, Google
Shari Trewin, IBM Research

Special Issue
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Chieko Asakawa, IBM Japan
Hironobu Takagi, IBM Japan

Publications
-------------------------------------
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. Selected authors will be invited
to submit extended versions of their paper for publication in a journal to be announced.

W4A stats
-------------------------------------
As of July 2011 average downloads per article at the ACM Digital Library is 387 and average
citations per article 2.43. 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)

DON'T BE DETERRED!
While 'The Web of Data' 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.