The 2010 SIGACCESS Best Paper Award has been awarded to Jennifer Mankoff from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA, Gillian R. Hayes from University of California, Irvine, California, USA, and Devva Kasnitz from Devvaco Consulting & Society for Disability Studies, Eureka, California, USA, for their paper:

Disability Studies As a Source of Critical Inquiry for the Field of Assistive Technology

Disability studies and assistive technology are two related fields that have long shared common goals — understanding the experience of disability and identifying and addressing relevant issues. Despite these common goals, there are some important differences in what professionals in these fields consider problems, perhaps related to the lack of connection between the fields. To help bridge this gap, we review some of the key literature in disability studies. We present case studies of two research projects in assistive technology and discuss how the field of disability studies influenced that work, led us to identify new or different problems relevant to the field of assistive technology, and helped us to think in new ways about the research process and its impact on the experiences of individuals who live with disability. We also discuss how the field of disability studies has influenced our teaching and highlight some of the key publications and publication venues from which our community may want to draw more deeply in the future.

Full Paper Available from the ACM Digital Library

Labels: Awards, Best Paper

The 2009 SIGACCESS Best Paper Award has been awarded Hironobu Takagi, Shinya Kawanaka, Masatomo Kobayashi, Daisuke Sato and Chieko Asakawa from IBM Research, Yamato, Japan for their 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 Available from the ACM Digital Library

Labels: Awards, Best Paper