W4A 2011 - 8th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility

Crowdsourcing the Cloud: An Inclusive Web by All and For All?

Co-Located with the Twentieth International World Wide Web Conference, in Hyderabad, India.

Cloud-computing is the technological paradigm where computing resources are distributed over the Internet. This way, the browser becomes the interface to access services and applications with almost unlimited storage capacity and processing power. Cloud-computing and the applications deployed over it facilitate collective intelligence and crowdsourcing phenomena, where millions of users can contribute to a common goal. Following these approaches, a number of successful projects that focus on web accessibility have been released in recent years. These developments range from platforms to collectively removing accessibility barriers to making assistive technologies widespread and available for all. These preliminary approaches such as online screen-readers and accessibility repairing applications have yielded promising results towards an inclusive web by removing both economical and accessibility barriers. In order to develop the cloud to its full potential as far as accessibility is concerned, there are still several research questions that should address the weak points and challenges in a timely manner in order to create an inclusive Web.

Will crowdsourcing the cloud lead us to an inclusive Web by all and for all? Will crowdsourcing the cloud remove accessibility barriers for all? Will crowdsourcing the cloud make the Web accessible or inaccessible?

From this point of view, W4A 2011 is interested in the following topics in particular (but not exclusively!):

Cloud computing based assistive technologies
Deployment, acceptance and scalability issues of cloud computing accessibility tools
Tools for collaborative accessibility testing
Tools to collectively repair accessibility problems
Empirical studies and data analysis of crowdsourcing for accessibility
Cooperative authoring tools
Quality assurance of crowdsourcing generated content
Methodologies for crowdsourcing procedures for 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