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One World, One Web: Surfers become Designers?
Co-Located with the Seventeenth International World Wide Web Conference, in Beijing, China. The Conference will be held on Monday 21st and Tuesday 22nd April 2008.
The World Wide Web (Web) is returning to its origins, surfers are not just passive readers but content creators. Wiki's 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?
2008 Best Paper Award
Rui Lopes and Luis Carrico; for The impact of accessibility assessment in macro scale universal usability studies of the web2008 John M Slatin Award for Best Communication Paper
Carlos A Velasco, Dimitar Denev, Dirk Stegemann, and Yehya Mohamad; for A web compliance engineering framework to support the development of accessible rich internet applications 2008 Web Accessibility Challenge sponsored by Microsoft: Judges Award
Darren Lunn, Sean Bechhofer, Simon Harper; for The SADIe transcoding platform2008 Web Accessibility Challenge sponsored by Microsoft: Delegates Award
Jeffrey P. Bigham, Craig M. Prince, Sangyun Hahn, Richard E. Ladner; for WebAnywhere: a screen reading interface for the web on any computer 2008 Publications
- Read the W4A 2008 Proceedings Online at the ACM DL
- Read the W4A 2008 Special Issue in
'NRHM' [NOT YET AVAILABLE] - Read the W4A 2008 Conference Report Online at the ACM DL [NOT YET AVAILABLE]
- Read a selection of the W4A 2008 Slides (on Slideshare)
- Read Shadi Abou-Zahra's Keynote Slides (HTML - Slidy)
- Read Charles Chen's Slides (HTML - Slidy)
- Goto the W4A 2008 Conference Site
