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 possibilities

Collaborative 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

ASSETS was a great conference again this year. There were a lot of great presentations and lots of good discussion. This month, I just wanted to highlight the papers that won the best paper awards, but I also want to note that the proceedings of ASSETS 2008 is full of great papers.

SIGACCESS Best Paper Award: Computer usage by young individuals with down syndrome: an exploratory study

In this paper, we discuss the results of an online survey that investigates how children and young adults with Down syndrome use computers and computer-related devices. The survey responses cover 561 individuals with Down syndrome between the age of four to 21. The survey results suggest that the majority of the children and young adults with Down syndrome can use the mouse to interact with computers, which requires spatial, cognitive, and fine motor skills that were previously believed to be quite challenging for individuals with Down syndrome. The results show great difficulty in text entry using keyboards. Young individuals with Down syndrome are using a variety of computer applications and computer related devices, and computers and computer-related devices play important roles in the life of individuals with Down syndrome. There appears to be great potential in computer-related education and training to broaden existing career opportunities for individuals with Down syndrome, and there needs to be further research on this topic.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1414471.1414480
Full Proceedings: ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Assistive Technologies, (October 2008)
SIGACCESS Best Student Paper Award: What's new?: making web page updates accessible

Web applications facilitated by technologies such as JavaScript, DHTML, AJAX, and Flash use a considerable amount of dynamic web content that is either inaccessible or unusable by blind people. Server side changes to web content cause whole page refreshes, but only small sections of the page update, causing blind web users to search linearly through the page to find new content. The connecting theme is the need to quickly and unobtrusively identify the segments of a web page that have changed and notify the user of them. In this paper we propose Dynamo, a system designed to unify different types of dynamic content and make dynamic content accessible to blind web users. Dynamo treats web page updates uniformly and its methods encompass both web updates enabled through dynamic content and scripting, and updates resulting from static page refreshes, form submissions, and template-based web sites. From an algorithmic and interaction perspective Dynamo detects underlying changes and provides users with a single and intuitive interface for reviewing the changes that have occurred. We report on the quantitative and qualitative results of an evaluation conducted with blind users. These results suggest that Dynamo makes access to dynamic content faster, and that blind web users like it better than existing interfaces.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1414471.1414499
Full Proceedings: ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Assistive Technologies, (October 2008)

Labels: accessibility, assets2008, conference

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