Access For All

9th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility – 16/17th April 2012 – Lyon, France

The World Wide Web has changed the way we search, access, consume and produce information. While existing superficial content allows us to browse and interact with the Web, we are far from taking full advantage of it. Laying beneath the surface of the Web there are a number of phenomena such as 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.

So 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. As a result, topics of interests include (but are not limited to):

• Intelligent processing of the massively produced reports by accessibility testing tools.
• Web mining and AI techniques for accessibility testing and repairing.
• Usage patterns of accessibility tools on the cloud.
• How to use data produced by means of crowd-sourcing accessibility fixes.
• How data produced while interacting and traversing the Web can improve accessibility.
• How to create user profiles from log data.
• The characterization of the Web at a macro and micro-scale.
• Accessibility of Linked Data repositories.
• Using Linked Data to better organise knowledge on Web accessibility.
• Web authoring guidelines and tools
• Mobile accessibility
• User modeling and the adaptive web
• Adaptation and transformation of existing Web content
• 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
• Accessible graphic formats and tools for their creation

More information on the event website.

Involving people with disabilities from the beginning of a project helps you better understand accessibility issues and implement more effective accessibility solutions. It also broadens your perspective in a way that can lead you to discover new ways of thinking about your product that will make it work better for more people in more situations.

This applies when designing and developing:
- Websites and web applications
- Browsers, media players, and assistive technologies
- Authoring tools such as content management systems (CMS), blog software, and WYSIWYG editors
- Accessibility standards and policies
- Web technologies and technical specifications, such as HTML

in this respect, the W3C WAI Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) published documents to help:

• Involving Users in Web Projects for Better, Easier Accessibility
• Involving Users in Evaluating Web Accessibility

The documents provide guidance on including real users, covering:
- How involving users early helps
- Finding a range of users
- Working with users
- Analyzing accessibility issues
- Drawing conclusions and reporting
- Note for usability professionals
- Combining user involvement with standards
Source: WAI Interest Group

This report (Study report: Web accessibility in European countries: level of compliance with latest international accessibility specifications, notably WCAG 2.0, and approaches or plans to implement those specifications) presents the results of a study to provide data and analysis to support the European Commission in the identification of EU-level measures that can help to progress the achievement of greater levels of web accessibility across the Member States. The aim was to provide evidence and analysis to help understand and compare the approaches followed by the European countries, with a view to identifying issues and challenges, good practices and future priorities in the web accessibility field.
A core focus of the report is on the issue of transitioning to WCAG 2.0 guidelines against the current background where Member States have, in the main, being targeting their efforts towards the earlier WCAG 1.0 guidelines.
Download the report and its annexes

A relevant project in this area is ACCESSIBLE which will soon provide access to free accessibility assessment and simulation tools, applicable for websites, webservices and mobile services.