The 15th Web for All Conference Lyon, France 2018

Publications

Conference proceedings have the ISBN is 978-1-4503-5651-0 and include abstracts and notes sections for all our technical, communications, challenge, doctoral consortium and keynote presentations. The conference proceedings will be published as part of the ACM International Conference Proceedings Series and will be available at the ACM Digital Library.

History

W4A was established in 2004 as a cross-disciplinary conference focusing on research in the area of the Web and accessibility, primarily for people with disabilities. Since then, it has become an established part of the accessibility research calendar, taking place alongside the annual WWW conference. Every year, we welcome between 50-70 attendees, who come from a large number of research institutions around the world, including academia, industry, government, and disability support organizations.

Papers have typically been reviewed by at least three of our program committee members with an average acceptance rate of 35%. Papers of our conference are published in ISBNed ACM proceedings and in various Special Issues of respected journals within the field. We also solicit sponsorship from the ACM SIGACCESS, ACM SIGCHI, ACM SIGWEB, plus organisations including IBM Research, Adobe, Mozilla Foundation, Google, Microsoft, The Paciello Group, Zakon Group.

Lunch and Coffee

The conference lunch and coffee will be held together with the World Wide Web conference. The morning coffee break is scheduled for 10:30-11:00, the lunch for 12:30-13.30 and the afternoon coffee break is scheduled for 15:00-15:30.

Past Conference Locations:
W4A 2017, Perth, Australia W4A 2016, Montreal, Canada

W4A 2015, Florence, Italy W4A 2014, Seoul, South Kore

W4A 2013, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil W4A 2012, Lyon, France

W4A 2011, Hyderabad, India W4A 2010, Raleigh, NC, USA

W4A 2009, Madrid, Spain W4A 2008, Beijing, China

W4A 2007. Banff, Canada W4A 2006, Edinburgh, UK

W4A 2005, Chiba, Japan W4A 2004, New York, NY, USA

Keynote Speakers

Amy Hurst

Amy Hurst is an associate professor of Human-Centered Computing in theInformation Systems Department at University of Maryland Baltimore County and studies accessibility challenges in real-world settings. Her research focuses on addressing accessibility problems understanding diverse user’s abilities, habits, and preferences. At UMBC she founded the Prototyping and Design Lab (a collaborative making space for technologists and artists) and is an active member of theInteractive Systems Research Center. Amy received her PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from the HCII at Carnegie Mellon in 2010 and has an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology.

Justine Cassell

Justine Cassell is Associate Dean of Technology Strategy and Impact in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and Director Emerita of the Human Computer Interaction Institute. She co-directs the Yahoo-CMU InMind partnership on the future of personal assistants. Previously Cassell was faculty at Northwestern University where she founded the Technology and Social Behavior Doctoral Program and Research Center. Before that she was a tenured professor at the MIT Media Lab. Cassell received the MIT Edgerton Prize, and Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision award, in 2011 was named to the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on AI and Robotics, in 2012 named a AAAS fellow, in 2016 made a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Scotland, and in 2017 made a Fellow of the ACM. In 2017-2018 Cassell holds the Chaire Blaise Pascal in Paris, where she is a visiting researcher at the Sorbonne. Cassell has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos for the past 7 years on topics concerning the impact of AI and Robotics on society.

Professor Helen Petrie: The William Loughborough After-Dinner Speaker

Helen Petrie is Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the Department of Computer Science at the University of York. She is a Chartered Psychologist and Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society and has degrees in both psychology and computer science. Her interest in accessibility started when she worked for the Royal National Institute for Blind People (RNIB) helping to design and evaluate one of the first screenreaders for Windows. Since then she has worked on many aspects of accessibility and assistive technology, particularly for visually impaired and older people. She has received a Royal Television Society Technical Innovation Prize, a Social Impact Award from the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the RNIB

W4A/TPG Web Accessibility Challenge