Proceedings of the 8th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility

Abstract

It is our great pleasureIt is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 8th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility - ASSETS 2006. This year's conference continues its tradition of being the premier forum for presentation of research results and experience reports on leading edge issues of the design, development, and application of computer-based methodologies to achieve the objectives of universal access, with special attention to the needs of people of all ages and with different capabilities. Computer and Information Technologies have re-designed the way modern society operates. In particular, they have identified new avenues to assist individuals with special needs and provide tools and resources to alleviate the traditional barriers encountered by people with disabilities. For example, speech generation systems have assisted people with visual impairments and blindness, voice recognition has helped people with motor impairments, and multi-modal presentations have been shown to be effective in helping people with learning disabilities. The ASSETS series of conferences is aimed at providing a technical forum for presenting and disseminating innovative research results that cover either (1) applications of computing and information technologies to provide assistive systems to people with special needs, or (2) investigation of computing technologies and their use by people with disabilities. As in previous years, the conference is organized in such a way as to promote an open forum where researchers, practitioners, educators, and students can present their ideas as formal papers, posters, demonstrations, as well as engage in dialogue, sharing experiences, objectives, accomplishments and different perspectives. In this tradition, ASSETS 2006 is developed as a single-track conference, where formal presentations, interactive sessions, panels, and social events alternate throughout the conference programme.This year, the conference opened with a plenary address by Dr. Sara J. Czaja, Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and Industrial Engineering at the University of Miami. Her presentation was "Technology and Older Adults: Designing for Accessibility and Usability". The technical programme was composed of 28 formal papers, selected by the international programme committee out of a total of 78 submissions. The accepted submissions represent the work of 94 authors from Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Japan, UK, and the USA. The papers were organized in 7 thematic sessions. The programme also includes 2 sessions dedicated to the presentation of cutting-edge results and work-in-progress, in the form of demonstrations and posters, chaired by John Black. Posters and demos were submitted in response to a separate call for papers, which generated 45 submissions, of which 34 were selected for presentation. A 2-page abstract for each poster and demonstration appears in these proceedings. Both technical papers and poster/demonstration papers were subjected to a competitive peer-review process, ensuring that the papers included in these proceedings represent the state-of-the-art in the field. The programme was completed by the student research competition and the doctoral consortium. The doctoral consortium, chaired by Yeliz Yesilada and Andrew Sears, offers an opportunity to doctoral students to present their ideas to both peers and a selected pool of experts. New for this year is the SIGACCESS student research competition (sponsored by Microsoft Research) and chaired by Clayton Lewis. The SRC differs from the doctorial consortium in that entrants can be undergraduate or graduate students. A small number of semi finalists were chosen by the judges to present their work in the conference and of those three students were designated as finalists by the judges, and entered in to the Grand Finals of ACM's Student Research Competition.Following the tradition of the previous ASSETS, SIGACCESS will present two awards: the SIGACCESS Best Technical Paper Award and the SIGACCESS Best Student Paper Award. The success of a conference depends on the contributions of many people. Some are named in the following organizing roster, but many more have contributed to the development of this event. We wish to thank all of them for their truly exceptional job.