Submitted by: Vicki L. Hanson, SIGACCESS Past Chair and Andrew Sears, SIGACCESS Chair
SIGACCESS continues to expand its membership and activities to meet member needs. This report highlights SIGACCESS Awards as well and the SIG’s conference, publication, and other activities.
First Place in this competition was awarded to Xu Liu. ASSETS’08 SRC winners competed in the ACM-wide SRC. Across all ACM SIGs and conferences participating, Xu was awarded first place in the Graduate Student Category for his paper “Mobile Currency Reader for People with Visual Impairments”. He was invited to the ACM Awards ceremony in San Diego in June where the award was announced. For more information, see http://www.acm.org/src/.
This is a tremendous honor for Xu. In addition, SIGACCESS is pleased that this is the second time in the past few years that the ASSETS SRC has produced the ACM 1st Place Winner. The previous recipient of this prize was Eugene Borodin in 2007.
Two years ago the SIGACCESS Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computing and Accessibility was created. The award, given every other year, recognizes individuals who have made significant and lasting contributions to the development of computing technologies that improve the accessibility of media and services to people with disabilities. Outstanding contributions through research, practice, or advocacy are recognized. The award recognizes members of the community for long-term accomplishments or those who have made a notable impact through a significant innovation. The inaugural award was presented in 2008 to Jim Thatcher. Nominations to begin the 2010 award process will be announced shortly.
Feng, J., Lazar, J., Kumin, L., and Ozok, A. 2008. Computer Usage by Young Individuals With Down Syndrome: An Exploratory Study. In Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, October 13 - 15, 2008). ASSETS’08. ACM, New York, NY, 35-42. DOI=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1414471.1414480.
Borodin, Y., Bigham, J. P., Raman, R., and Ramakrishnan, I. V. 2008. What's New?: Making Web Page Updates Accessible. In Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, October 13 - 15, 2008). ASSETS’08. ACM, New York, NY, 145-152. DOI=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1414471.1414499.
ASSETS’08 was held in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. This was the first time ASSETS has been held outside the US since 2002. Conference attendance was excellent, exceeding attendance projections. Particularly notable was that the conference continues to expand areas of research, with a number of cognitive issues represented in this year’s papers. This broadening of research interests attests to the growing importance of considering the needs of a diverse population.
For the fifth year, the conference featured an NSF sponsored Doctoral Consortium (see http://www.sigaccess.org/community/newsletter/january_2009/). This consortium allowed advanced doctoral students to present their dissertation topics and receive feedback during formative stages of their work.
The conference also hosted its third Microsoft Student Research Competition (SRC) event. The SRC allows students from diverse ACM areas to present their work and get recognized for achievement. Award winners were:
The SIGACCESS Business Meeting head at ASSETS updated attendees on SIG activities and discussed ideas for new activities. Key issues included accessibility of publications in the ACM Digital Library. Specifically, it was considered important to work with ACM to ensure that ASSETS Proceedings are accessible.
The inaugural issue of the ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS) appeared in May, 2008. Since May, four additional issues have been published. See http://portal.acm.org/toc.cfm?id=J1156&type=periodical&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=43106710&CFTOKEN=53985827 for details. TACCESS is a quarterly journal that publishes refereed articles addressing issues of computing as it impacts the lives of people with disabilities. It provides a technical forum for disseminating innovative research related to computing technologies and their use by people with disabilities. This journal is available online to SIGACCESS members.
The SIGACCESS newsletter continues with its regular online publications with Sri Kurniawan, Editor-in-Chief, see http://www.sigaccess.org/community/newsletter/.
Also available on the SIGACCESS website is the monthly “left field” column (see http://www.sigaccess.org/community/left_field/) by Yeliz Yesilada. The goal of Left Field is to bring to the attention of members publications for the ACM Digital Library that are of interest, but published in venues typically outside the reading of SIGACCESS members.
SIGACCESS provided financial support for the International Cross Disciplinary Workshop on Web Accessibility 2009 (W4A) at the WWW Conference in Madrid this past April (see http://www.w4a.info/2009/).
The SIGACCESS website recently received a new look. This accessible site was created and is maintained by the new SIGACCESS webmaster, Darren Lunn of the University of Manchester.
We note the passing on April 11 of our friend and colleague Noëlle Carbonell. Those of you who knew her personally know of her great humanity, keen intellect, and dedication to high quality work. As Secretary-Treasurer of SIGACCESS these past three years she was a staunch advocate for people with disabilities and was a strong advocate for international cooperation on research in this area. We will greatly miss her energy and passion.
