I guess "CAPTCHA" research is not a left field topic for accessibility researchers, but while I was browsing the ACM DL, I came across a workshop called "EUROSEC: Third European Workshop on System Security" which was held this month in Paris, France. A paper published in this workshop caught my attention called "The robustness of a new CAPTCHA". Even though this paper examines the security of a new CAPTCHA, I though people who work on making CAPTCHAs accessible would find this paper interesting.

The robustness of a new CAPTCHA

"CAPTCHA is a standard security technology that presents tests to tell computers and humans apart. In this paper, we examine the security of a new CAPTCHA that was deployed until very recently by Megaupload, a leading online storage and delivery website. The security of this scheme relies on a novel segmentation resistance mechanism. However, we show that this CAPTCHA can be segmented using a simple but new automated attack with a success rate of 78%. It takes about 120 ms on average to segment each challenge on a standard desktop computer."

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1752046.1752052
Full Proceedings: Labels: captcha, security, Web accessibility

The W4A 2009 conference was co-located with the Eighteenth International World Wide Web Conference, in Madrid, Spain. The two days of the conference were full of great presentations and discussions. The theme this year was "Web Accessibility for Older Users Are We There Yet?". If you do research related to this area, I am sure that you will find lots of interesting papers in the proceedings. The full proceedings is now available in the ACM DL and the papers that won the best paper awards are as follows:

2009 Best Paper Award: About the relevance of accessibility barriers in the everyday interactions of older people with the web

This paper reports key findings of a 3-year ethnographical study of the everyday interactions of older people with the web. The data consisted of in-situ observations and conversations with 388 older people while using myriads of web and computer technologies daily. The results revealed that the accessibility barriers that had a more negative effect on the daily interactions of older people with the web were due to their difficulties in remembering steps, understanding web and computer jargon and using the mouse, despite their willingness to use it. These obstacles were much more important than those caused by their difficulties perceiving visual information, understanding icons and using the keyboard. The prioritization of barriers was explained by two key aspects in ageing with new technologies, independency and inclusiveness, and a desired condition of web (user) interfaces, consistency in terminology. These results suggest that these three aspects should be considered carefully in enhancing web accessibility for older people, as well as allowing us to grasp older people's everyday web accessibility barriers. The paper discusses possible ways of making use of these findings to make the web more accessible to older people.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1535654.1535682

2009 John M Slatin Award for Best Communication Paper: Prosumers and accessibility: how to ensure a productive interaction

User-generated content (UGC) has become prevalent on the Web. It is not created by professional developers, but by prosumers: basic web users that also produce their own content. Thus, they lack any background, training, wherewithal, awareness and accountability regarding accessibility. We have extracted from top-used UGC sites a set of best practices to improve accessibility of UGC, focusing on the role the community itself plays in ensuring it. As we have merely compiled best practices, authoring tools and web content guidelines have not been redefined, but rather referenced and instantiated by UGC-specific recommendations.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1535654.1535665
Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the 2009 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibililty (W4A) 2009, Madrid, Spain, April 20 - 21, 2009.

Labels: older Web users, W4A, Web accessibility

Communications of the ACM (CACM) is not really a left-field magazine for us, but I would like to bring your attention to the following two articles published recently at CACM:

• Access for All: I strongly recommend you this article. Probably you already know the content but it's good to see that such an article will reach the wide audience of CACM.

  Abstract: Accessible technologies are improving the lives of millions of physically impaired people around the world.

  Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1378704.1378709
  Full Proceedings: Communications of the ACM, Volume 51, Issue 8 (August 2008)
  
• Web science: an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the web: If you are not sure what Web science is, this is a good article to start with.

  Abstract: The Web must be studied as an entity in its own right to ensure it keeps flourishing and prevent unanticipated social effects.

  Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1364782.1364798
  Full Proceedings: Communications of the ACM, Volume 51, Issue 7 (July 2008)

Labels: cacm, Web accessibility, web science

SIGSOFT is an ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering and has a monthly informal publication called Software Engineering Notes (SEN). This month, when I was browsing in the ACM DL, an article from the latest issue of SEN grabbed my attention: History of computers can raise student's interest. According to this short note, if well-known personalities speak about the old times, students get more interested in computer history. Apparently this idea is also supported by another article titled as The design of a history of computing course with a unique perspective. I am just wondering, why don't we do this for accessibility? Why don't we have well-known personalities in the accessibility community telling us about the old times to increase students' interest in accessibility?

History of computers can raise student's interest

What was software development back in the 1960's and how did it evolve?

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1384139.1384152
Full Proceedings: ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, Volume 33, Issue 4 (July 2008) The design of a history of computing course with a unique perspective

In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a new history of computing course that includes personal and historical perspectives from faculty members to supplement the course material. Despite decreasing enrollments in our computer science courses, this new course has achieved significantly large enrollments and a wide audience due to this unique faculty perspective in addition to the approval of this course as a general education requirement that addresses the implications of science and technology on society.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1121341.1121366
Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the 37th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education, 2006, Houston, Texas, USA.

Labels: computing, education, history, Web accessibility

This year was the fifth time that the Web4All (W4A) was running and was co-located with the World Wide Web Conference (WWW) in Beijing, China. The theme this year was "One World, One Web: Surfers become Designers?". There were a lot of discussions and great presentations. There were two keynote presentations: T. V. Raman (Google Research, USA) - "Cloud computing and equal access for all" and Shadi Abou-Zahra (W3C) - "Towards bridging the accessibility needs of people with disabilities and the ageing community". Just to give you an idea about the papers, here is the paper which won the best paper award: The impact of accessibility assessment in macro scale universal usability studies of the web

This paper presents a modelling framework, Web Interaction Environments, to express the synergies and differences of audiences, in order to study universal usability of the Web. Based on this framework, we have expressed the implicit model of WCAG and developed an experimental study to assess the Web accessibility quality of Wikipedia at a macro scale. This has resulted on finding out that template mechanisms such as those provided by Wikipedia lower the burden of producing accessible contents, but provide no guarantee that hyperlinking to external websites maintain accessibility quality. We discuss the black-boxed nature of guidelines such as WCAG and how formalising audiences helps leveraging universal usability studies of the Web at macro scales.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1368044.1368048
Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the 2008 international cross-disciplinary conference on Web accessibility (W4A), 2008, Beijing, China.

Labels: W4A, Web, Web accessibility

A community conference: Web4All (W4A). This year was the first time that W4A was held as a co-located conference as opposed to being a workshop with the World Wide Web Conference (WWW) in Banff, Canada. The main conference theme was "Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web: Hindrance or Opportunity?". There were a lot of interesting papers, presentations and discussions which were supported by the keynote speakers: Becky Gibson - "Enabling an Accessible Web 2.0" (IBM Human Ability and Accessibility Center), Mary Zajicek - "Web 2.0: Hype or Happiness?" (Oxford Brookes University, UK), Michael Cooper - "Accessibility of Emerging Rich Web Technologies: Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web" (WAI, W3C) and Ian Horrocks - "Semantic Web: the Story so Far" (University of Manchester, Manchester, UK). Just to give you an idea about the papers, here is the Takayuki Watanabe's paper who won the best paper award: Experimental evaluation of usability and accessibility of heading elements

Task completion times of sighted and blind users were measured with two kinds of Web sites: sites marked up appropriately with heading elements and sites with the same visual appearance but with no heading elements marked up. The experiment was carried out with user agents that could navigate through heading elements. The results showed that 1) task completion time was reduced by as much as one half with marked up heading elements, 2) the benefits of markup on task completion time were greater for blind users, and 3) the overall difference in response time between sighted and blind users diminished with sites that were appropriately marked up.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1243441.1243473 Full Proceedings: International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A 2007)

Labels: conference, W4A, Web accessibility