Proceedings of the International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility

The International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A) was started in 2004 with the aim of accelerating research activities towards an accessible World Wide Web. Through previous conferences, a growing number of participants from academia, industry, government and non-profit organisations around the world have gathered to exchange their latest research results, widen their perspectives through discussions with their peers, and establish future research agendas across disciplines and sectors. Each year, we choose a theme to encourage a focus on the emerging challenges in a particular area of accessibility, and for W4A 2012 we aim at exploring the challenges that the Web of Data poses on web accessibility and also we want to ascertain how we can benefit from the methods, techniques and tools used in the domain of the Web of data as some of the problems we face are common: information overload, data unreachability, lack of semantic linking and unstructured content. When we refer to the Web of data we try to target different phenomena occurring on the Web. The existing superficial content allows us to browse and interact with the Web; however, we are far from taking full advantage of it. For instance, laying beneath the surface of the Web we can find trends and patterns in information structure and in user behaviour that do shape the way we communicate, consume and browse. As far as accessibility is concerned, Web content plays a central role in an ecosystem where user agents, authoring tools, crowd-sourcing frameworks and testing tools determine how accessible is the Web. As these components are moving to the cloud, their mere activity and interplay produces large amounts of data. For instance, thousands of testing reports are being generated every day by automatic tools and auditors. Moreover, crowd-sourcing tools are facilitating a myriad of accessibility fixes and providing guidance to users. In parallel, announcements made by UK and US governments, amongst others, to make public data available are contributing to adding enormous amounts of data to the Web. While some of these data repositories consist of raw data, some other are explicitly structured and semantically annotated set of documents. However, users still find it difficult to access to these data mainly because of information overload and access barriers. So even if the major goal of Open Government initiatives is to foster transparency, the reality is that citizens struggle to access. Therefore we can find data produced by the accessibility ecosystem --- users and tools --- and intentionally uploaded data. The former, if adequately exploited, can yield invaluable knowledge to better understand web accessibility as a phenomenon. The latter provide us mechanisms to arrange these data on the web so that they are accessible for machines although not for humans. This year, we a had a record of submissions, 7 technical papers and 14 communication papers were selected from 39 submissions through peer review process. The number of submissions is steadily growing each year and for the next edition, which is the 10th anniversary of our conference, we expect to hit 50 submissions. As usual, we received submissions from researchers worldwide, spanning Asia, Europe, North America, Oceania and South America. The coverage of submissions was comprehensive and innovative across Web accessibility research fields: sign language on the Web, ubiquitous accessibility, access to rich and dynamic content and dyslexia issues on the Web. Acceptance rate of technical papers was 30%. W4A is a small yet influential conference that has a growing impact on the research community. We back this statement as according to the ACM Digital Library, on average, each W4A paper has been downloaded 441 times and has 3.06 citations. It is the acceptance rate as well as the thorough review process which leads to a high quality number of papers that ensures the excellence of the W4A conference. These data confirm that W4A does not only provide excellent visibility to papers but also enables strong scientific impact.