Not a left-field topic this month...Unfortunately, I could not attend the ASSETS conference this year, but I heard that it was again an excellent conference with great papers and presentations. The Full proceedings is available in ACM DL, but here I just wanted to highlight best papers:
BEST PAPER: Collaborative web accessibility improvement: challenges and possibilitiesCollaborative accessibility improvement has great potential to make the Web more adaptive in a timely manner by inviting users into the improvement process. The Social Accessibility Project is an experimental service for a new needs-driven improvement model based on collaborative metadata authoring technologies. In 10 months, about 18,000 pieces of metadata were created for 2,930 webpages through collaboration. We encountered many challenges as we sought to create a new mainstream approach. The productivity of the volunteer activities exceeded our expectation, but we found large and important problems in the screen reader users' lack of awareness of their own accessibility problems. In this paper, we first introduce examples, analyze some statistics from the pilot service and then discuss our findings and challenges. Three future directions including site-wide authoring are considered.Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1639642.1639677
BEST STUDENT PAPER: ClassInFocus: enabling improved visual attention strategies for deaf and hard of hearing students
Deaf and hard of hearing students must juggle their visual attention in current classroom settings. Managing many visual sources of information (instructor, interpreter or captions, slides or whiteboard, classmates, and personal notes) can be a challenge. ClassInFocus automatically notifies students of classroom changes, such as slide changes or new speakers, helping them employ more beneficial observing strategies. A user study of notification techniques shows that students who liked the notifications were more likely to visually utilize them to improve performance.Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1639642.1639656
Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the 11th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, 2009, ISBN: 978-1-60558-558-1.
Labels: accessibility, ASSETS2009, conference