W4A 2012

Joint W4A WWW 2012 Panel on “Exploring Perceptions of Accessibility”

• Open to all WWW2012 and W4A2012 Attendees
• Wednesday April 18th 2012 – 16:00-17:30
• #w4apanel12 #w4a12

Panelists

• Ricardo Baeza-Yates (VP of Research for EMEA & LatAm Yahoo! Research);
• Chieko Asakawa (IBM Fellow, IBM Research – Tokyo);
• Ed Chi (Research Scientist, Google+, Google);
• Bebo White (Departmental Associate – Emeritus, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory);
• Mike Paciello (Founder & Principal, TPG); and
• Georges Gouriten (Télécom ParisTech).

Exploring Perceptions of Accessibility

We will be running a joint W4A WWW 2012 panel on our perceptions of the definitions of accessibility at WWW 2012. Work suggests that there are many different views of web accessibility, and we see that there are many questions to be answered: what is the relationship between web accessibility and usability? Is web accessibility for all or is it strictly for disabled people? What kind of evaluation methods, ethos, and rationale are key? How important is context for web accessibility? Investigating these questions is important because they will help us to:

• Guide and help in better teaching web accessibility by solidifying ideas, concepts, and language into a more solid bedrock of understanding;
• Better communicate the meaning of the concept to people who are not in the field, and thereby making communication with the wider community, companies, and governments more harmonious and insightful;
• Advance web accessibility as a research field by providing a shared understanding, grammar, and lexicons; and
• Improve penetration of web accessibility into commercial and industrial settings by harmonizing the language and therefore the expectations of companies with regard to planning, budgeting, enacting policy, or conforming to accessibility requirements and legislation.

We want the views of Web Engineers / Scientists / Developers / Accessibility Specialists.

A major benefit of this panel is that it will bring together the W4A and WWW community; and make explicit the views that these communities have on web accessibility and its drivers – thereby creating a shared understanding. We see this more of a focus group in which audience participation will be vital, and so will confine each panelist to a 5 minute presentation followed by a 10 minute ‘brainstorming’ discussion by all.

The panel will be very interactive and will make use of social networking sites such as twitter, Facebook, etc. Further, we will be making voice and video recordings of the session – sharing this information with the community for others to have the chance to interpret the data for their own purposes – and stream the panel for remote participation.

Your participation is critical to the panel session; your views will make it into a research output which may help change the nature of the Web Accessibility field.

Organizers: Simon Harper, Yeliz Yesilada, Giorgio Brajnik, and Markel Vigo – in the interests of openness, this is related to work we are currently undertaking and we would expect to integrate the findings of this panel into an expanded report and paper (inviting panelists to be co-authors, and acknowledging the audience as a whole and by name – where required).