Have you heard about the workshop called "Location and the Web"? This year it was run in conjunction with CHI 2009 so some of you may have already attended this workshop. Location and the Web aims to "to bring together researchers to discuss the ways in which location as a first-class concept in Web services and Web applications will transform the Web into a location-aware information system". The proceedings this year include a number of discussion papers or papers about on-going work. One of them is called "Exploring future challenges for haptic, audio and visual interfaces for mobile maps and location based services". This paper is very interesting and it's good at showing how everybody can benefit from the research on accessibility.

Exploring future challenges for haptic, audio and visual interfaces for mobile maps and location based services

In this article we give an overview of some challenges in how to make geospatial information more useable and accessible. We also suggest a roadmap for dealing with these challenges -- and introduce a new EU project HaptiMap.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1507136.1507144
Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Location and the Web 2009, Boston, Massachusetts, April 04 - 04, 2009.

Labels: Haptic, Location, Web

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