October 23-24, 2010; Orlando, Florida [NSF support for this workshop is being pursued]

Electronic solutions for storing, retrieving, sharing, and analyzing health related information are being rapidly developed and deployed. Solutions may be designed for health care professionals or consumers. resulting in a wide range of challenges. Textual and graphical information must be entered, updated, and retrieved. Frequent and infrequent users must be supported. Security must be maintained, collaboration should be supported, and privacy must be ensured.

This workshop focuses on the issues and challenges associated with ensuring access to this information by providers and consumers with disabilities. We seek to bring the health care and accessibility communities together to share experiences, discuss challenges, and develop a research agenda. This includes:

• individuals engaged in developing, deploying, or using electronic health records,
• individuals engaged in research on electronic health records
• individuals engaged in research on information technology accessibility
• individuals interested in becoming involved in any of the activities listed above.

This one and one-half day workshop will be co-located with ASSETS 2010 in Orlando, Florida and will take place on October 23-24. Travel funds including airfare, local travel, and hotel will be provided as well as several group meals.

Individuals interested in participating should submit a position statement of no more than two pages which outlines their background, relevant experience, how they anticipate contributing to the workshop, and the benefits they expect to receive through their participation. Position statements should be submitted electronically (send to asears-AT-umbc.edu) no later than August 2, 2010. Individuals will be informed if they have been selected to participate by August 16, 2010.

Workshop Organizers: Andrew Sears, UMBC, Vicki Hanson, University of Dundee

Labels: Call For Papers, Workshop

July 2nd, 2010: Posters, Demos, Doctoral Consortium and Student Research Competition.

People with disabilities can use Computer and Information Technologies to overcome barriers encountered in day-to-day life, and to participate more fully in society. The ASSETS series of conferences explores the potential of Computer and Information Technologies to support and include individuals with disabilities, and those around them. ASSETS is the premier forum for presenting innovative research on the design and use of both mainstream and specialized assistive technologies by people with disabilities. Sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and its SIGACCESS Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing, ASSETS includes formal paper sessions, demonstrations, posters, a doctoral consortium, and a student research competition. The single track and friendly atmosphere make ASSETS the ideal venue to meet researchers, practitioners, developers and policymakers to exchange ideas, share information, and make new contacts.

Topics

High quality, original submissions on topics relevant to computers and accessibility are invited. Appropriate topics include (but are not limited to) the use of technology by and in support of:

• Individuals with hearing, sight and other sensory impairments
• Individuals with motor impairments
• Individuals with memory, learning and cognitive impairments
• Individuals with multiple impairments
• Older adults

Successful submissions typically present (though submissions from other related areas are encouraged) novel ideas, designs, techniques, systems, evaluations, scientific investigations, methodologies, social issues or policy issues relating to:

• Assistive technologies that improve day-to-day life
• Assistive technologies that improve access to mainstream Computer and Information Technologies
• Innovative use of mainstream technologies to overcome access barriers
• Accessibility and usability of mainstream technologies
• Identification of barriers to technology access that are not addressed by existing research
• Where relevant, work that includes empirical data from the target user groups is strongly preferred.

Labels: ASSETS, Call For Papers, Posters and Demonstrations

Current search systems are not adequate for individuals with specific needs: children, older adults, people with visual or motor impairments, and people with intellectual disabilities or low literacy. Search services are typically created for average users (young or middle-aged adults without physical or mental disabilities) and information retrieval methods are based on their perception of relevance as well. The workshop will be the first to raise the discussion on how to make search engines accessible for different types of users, including those with problems in reading, writing or comprehension of complex content. Search accessibility means that people whose abilities are considerably different from those that average users have will be able to successfully use search systems.

The objective of the workshop is to provide a forum and initiate collaborations between academics and industrial practitioners interested in making search more usable for users in general and for users with specific needs in particular. We encourage presentation and participation from researchers working at the intersection of information retrieval, natural language processing, human-computer interaction, ambient intelligence and related areas.

Topics

The workshop welcomes contributions on any issue concerning accessible search, for instance:

• Understanding of search behavior of users with specific needs
• Understanding of relevance criteria of users with specific needs
• Understanding the effects of domain expertise, age, user experience and cognitive abilities on search goals and results evaluation
• Non-topical aspects of relevance: text style, readability, appropriateness of language (harassment and explicit content detection)
• Development of test collections for evaluation of accessible search systems
• Collaborative search techniques for assisting users with specific needs (e.g. parents helping children)
• Potential of search personalization techniques to satisfy users with specific needs
• Search interfaces and result representation for people with specific needs
• Using assistive technologies for interaction with search systems, e.g. speech recognition or eye tracking software for querying and browsing.

Invited Speakers

The organisers are pleased to announce two invited speakers who will present at the workshop:

Dr. T.V. Raman, Senior Research Scientist at Google Labs. Dr. Raman leads the project "Google Accessible Search", helping users with impairments to find accessible Web content.

Dr. Allison Druin, Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland. Since 1998, Dr. Druin has led an interdisciplinary research teams looking for ways to improve information access for children and understand their search behaviour.

Papers and Posters

The conference language is English. The workshop will be a mix of oral presentations for long papers (maximum of 8 pages), a session for posters (maximum of 2 pages) and a panel discussion. All submissions will be reviewed by at least two program committee members. Workshop proceedings will be available at the workshop.

Please, submit papers in pdf-format, using the ACM SIG Proceedings style using EasyChair

Important Dates

4 June:

Paper submission deadline (previous deadline: 23 May)

16 June:

Notification of acceptance

23 June:

Camera-ready papers due (provisional, awaiting confirmation from the SIGIR conference chairs)

23 July:

Workshop in Geneva, Switzerland

Labels: Call For Papers, Workshop

The 12th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, 25-27 October 2010, Orlando, Florida, USA.

People with disabilities can use Computer and Information Technologies to overcome barriers encountered in day-to-day life, and to participate more fully in society.

The ASSETS series of conferences explores the potential of Computer and Information Technologies to support and include individuals with disabilities, and those around them. ASSETS is the premier forum for presenting innovative research on the design and use of both mainstream and specialized assistive technologies by people with disabilities. Sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and its SIGACCESS Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing, ASSETS includes formal paper sessions, demonstrations, posters, a doctoral consortium, and a student research competition. The single track and friendly atmosphere make ASSETS the ideal venue to meet researchers, practitioners, developers and policymakers to exchange ideas, share information, and make new contacts.

Topics

High quality, original submissions on topics relevant to computers and accessibility are invited. Appropriate topics include (but are not limited to) the use of technology by and in support of:

• Individuals with hearing, sight and other sensory impairments
• Individuals with motor impairments
• Individuals with memory, learning and cognitive impairments
• Individuals with multiple impairments
• Older adults

Successful submissions typically present (though submissions from other related areas are encouraged) novel ideas, designs, techniques, systems, evaluations, scientific investigations, methodologies, social issues or policy issues relating to:

• Assistive technologies that improve day-to-day life
• Assistive technologies that improve access to mainstream Computer and Information Technologies
• Innovative use of mainstream technologies to overcome access barriers
• Accessibility and usability of mainstream technologies
• Identification of barriers to technology access that are not addressed by existing research
• Where relevant, work that includes empirical data from the target user groups is strongly preferred.

Important Dates

Paper Submission:

7th May 2010

Posters, Demos, Doctoral Consortium and Student Research Competition:

2nd July 2010

URL:

http://www.sigaccess.org/assets10/

Labels: ASSETS, Call For Papers, Conferences

The Fourth Web Accessibility Challenge in conjunction with the W4A 2010 Conference will take place at the WWW 2010 conference in April 26 and 27 in Raleigh, NC.

Goal

The Web Accessibility Challenge is organised to give an opportunity to researchers and developers of advanced Web accessibility technologies for showcasing their technologies to technical leaders in this area not only from academia and industry but also from end-users. To encourage and accelerate development of innovative and practically usable Web accessibility technologies; the Challenge is one part of the conference in which new experimental systems and technologies are submitted, compared, and judged by our independent panel of experts as to the most significant advance in research technology in accessibility for that year.

Topic

Please note that submissions can be related to the theme, “Developing Regions: Common Goals, Common Problems?” but it is certainly not a requirement as all accessibility technologies are welcomed for the challenge.

Submission Materials

We invite you to submit your work by submitting a:

• Two-page abstract (see the W4A submission page)
• Demonstration movie (or audio recording) with audio description.
• Software is not required, but encouraged.

System Requirements

Any kind of system is acceptable, such as standalone assistive technologies, voice browsers, browser plug-ins, server-based services, and telephony systems. Other accessibility technologies can be accepted (e.g., tactile browser). Open source systems are welcomed. Please contact us, if you have any questions about the coverage (cc2010@w4a.info).

Important Dates

Submission deadline is 19th February 2010 (Midnight Hawaii Standard Time).

Labels: Call For Papers, Challenge, W4A, Web Accessibility

Edinburgh University, UK, 13-16 April 2010

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and British Computer Society (BCS) are delighted to invite you to the joint ACM-BCS 2010 “Visions of Computer Science” conference, to be held at the Informatics Forum, Edinburgh University, between April 13-16 2010. This flagship event aims to energise the computing community and bring it together around some positive and inspiring visions of our discipline and follows the highly successful "Visions of Computer Science" conference in 2008.

Topics

The proceedings will be published on the BCS electronic proceedings series and the ACM Digital Library. Some of the best papers will appear in The Computer Journal, the archival research publication of the BCS. Submissions are being solicited in all areas of research covering the broad field of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE). They include but are not limited to:

• Computer Architectures and Digital Systems
• Theoretical Computer Science: Algorithms and Complexity
• Logic and Semantics
• Non-standard Models of Computation
• Programming Methods and Languages
• Software Engineering, and System Design Tools
• Quantitative Evaluation of Algorithms, Systems, and Networks
• Artificial Intelligence, Agents, and Machine Learning
• Computer Networks
• Distributed and Pervasive Systems
• Grid Computing and eScience
• Digital Economy
• Databases, Information Retrieval and Data Mining, Web based Computation
• Human Computer Interaction
• Robotics and Computer Vision
• Bioinformatics, Synthetic Biology and Synthetic Chemistry
• Medical Applications

Call for Papers

Submissions are being solicited in all areas of research covering the broad field of Computer Science and Engineering. The relevant dates for authors are:

submission:

18 December 2009

notification:

19 February 2010

camera-ready:

5 March 2010

The strict limit for submissions is 12 A4-pages in 10pt two-column style including figures and references. Authors may include a clearly marked appendix, which referees may or may not take into account. For more information see:
http://www.bcs.org/visions2010/.

Labels: Call For Papers, Conferences, Visions of Computer Science

Co-Located with the Nineteenth International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2010), in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, 26-27 April 2010.

Developing Regions: Common Goals, Common Problems?

A revolution in the information society is now starting, based on the use of mobile phones in developing countries. The hyper-growth of mobile phone penetration is deeply changing the lives of people in most of the world; their ways of communicating, working, learning, and structuring their societies. The promising next step is obviously to access the Web. The Web has already touched the lives of over a billion people and now is the time for the next billions.

However, this expansion faces unprecedented accessibility challenges. Even the word “accessibility” needs a new definition for people in the developing regions. How can someone who is illiterate or barely literate access the Web? In some cases, a language may not even have a written form. The affordability of the technology is also a challenge, while access is constrained by low computational power, limited bandwidth, compact keyboards, tiny screens, and even by the lack of electric power. All of these constraints compound the problems of access and inclusion.

The desire for access in developing regions and the resourcefulness of the people who want inclusion unite the communities of people in developing regions and the communities of disabled people in the developed world. Will complex and highly graphical interfaces exclude developing regions from access? What problems exist, what are the newly appearing problems, and what solutions are required? How do the adoption patterns for Web accessibility and inclusion vary across cultures? What effect will the Web in the developing regions have on accessibility in the developed regions and vice versa?

Note that while the commonalities between Web Accessibility and Developing Regions are this years theme, please don’t be deterred if this somewhat unique area is not yours. We would like to see all quality work on Web Accessibility regardless of the particular field within accessibility. The overriding reason for a paper being accepted is its high quality in relation to the broad area of Web Accessibility. In this case topics of interests include (but are not limited to):

• Inclusion and Citizen Empowerment in Developing Regions;
• Inclusion and Literacy in Developing Regions;
• Enhancing Education in Developing Regions;
• Accessibility Problems in Developing Regions;
• Web Based Employment in Developing Regions;
• Web Based Health Care in Developing Regions;
• Evaluation and Validation tools and techniques;
• User Experimentation looking at Social Networking and Freedom of Expression;
• User Agents for Developing Regions and User Agent Guidelines;
• Web Authoring Guidelines;
• Design and best practice to support Web accessibility;
• Technological advances to support Web accessibility;
• End user tools;
• Accessibility guidelines, best practice, evaluation techniques, and tools;
• Psychology of end user experiences and scenarios;
• Innovative techniques to support accessibility;
• Universally accessible graphical design approaches;
• Design Perspectives;
• Adapting existing Web content; and
• Accessible graphic formats and tools for their creation.

Web Accessibility Challenge

Sponsored by Microsoft since 2008, the “Web Accessibility Challenge” is organised to give an opportunity to researchers and developers of advanced Web accessibility technologies for showcasing their technologies to technical leaders in this area not only from academia and industry but also from end-users. More details:
http://www.w4a.info/2010/submissions/challenge.shtml.

Submission

We will accept position and technical papers, and short communications. Position papers should only be submitted as a communication of (up to 4-pages) whereas technical papers should be in full paper format (up to 10-pages). Accepted papers and communications will appear in the Conference proceedings contained on the Conference CD, and will also be accessible to the general public via the ACM Digital Library website. The official language of the Conference is English. Submission details are available at:
http://www.w4a.info/2010/submissions/index.shtml.

Important Dates

Technical and Communication Papers:

Submission: 01 February 2010 (Midnight Hawaii Standard Time)

Web Accessibility Challenge:

Submission: 19 February 2010 (Midnight Hawaii Standard Time)

More details:

http://www.w4a.info/2010/submissions/dates.shtml

Labels: Call For Papers, Conferences, W4A

Eleventh International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, October 26-28, 2009, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Call For Papers

People with disabilities can use Computer and Information Technologies to overcome barriers encountered in day-to-day life, and to participate more fully in society. The ASSETS series of conferences explores the potential of Computer and Information Technologies to support and include individuals with disabilities, and those around them. ASSETS is the premier forum for presenting innovative research on the design and use of both mainstream and specialized assistive technologies by people with disabilities. Sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and its SIGACCESS Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing, ASSETS includes formal paper sessions, demonstrations, posters, a doctoral consortium, and a student research competition. The single track and friendly atmosphere make ASSETS the ideal venue to meet researchers, practitioners, developers and policymakers to exchange ideas, share information, and make new contacts.

Topics

High quality, original submissions on topics relevant to computers and accessibility are invited. Appropriate topics include (but are not limited to) the use of technology by and in support of:

• Individuals with hearing, sight and other sensory impairments,
• Individuals with motor impairments,
• Individuals with memory, learning and cognitive impairments,
• Individuals with multiple impairments,
• Older adults

Successful submissions typically present (though submissions from other related areas are encouraged) novel ideas, designs, techniques, systems, evaluations, scientific investigations, methodologies, social issues or policy issues relating to:

• Assistive technologies that improve day-to-day life.
• Assistive technologies that improve access to mainstream Computer and Information Technologies.
• Innovative use of mainstream technologies to overcome access barriers.
• Accessibility and usability of mainstream technologies.
• Identification of barriers to technology access that are not addressed by existing research.

Where relevant, work that includes empirical data from the target user groups is strongly preferred.

Submission Procedures

ASSETS accepts submissions in the following categories:

• Technical papers.
• Posters.
• Demonstrations.
• Student research competition.
• Doctoral consortium.

All submissions will be peer-reviewed by an international panel. Submissions MUST contain substantial original, unpublished material. Overlapping material should not be submitted to multiple categories.

Important Dates

• Paper submission: May 10, 2009.
• Notification of acceptance (papers): June 29, 2009.
• Poster and demo submission: July 6, 2009.
• Student research competition submission: July 6, 2009.
• Doctoral consortium submission: July 17, 2009.
• Notification of acceptance (posters and demos): July 27, 2009.
• Notification of acceptance (student research competition): July 27, 2009.
• Camera-ready materials due: August 11, 2009.
• Notification of acceptance (doctoral consortium): August 21, 2009.

Labels: ASSETS, Call For Papers, Conferences