w4a 2012 - 9th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility

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