Co-Located with WWW2011 in Hyderabad, India.

So we are coming very close to the W4A Paper deadline for the 2011 edition, indeed, it is on the 10-Jan-2011. The theme this year is ‘Crowdsourcing the Cloud: An Inclusive Web by All and For All?’. While Crowdsourcing the Cloud is the theme, please don’t be deterred if this somewhat unique area is not yours. The organisers would like to see all quality work on Web Accessibility regardless of the particular field within accessibility. The overriding reason for a paper being accepted is its high quality in relation to the broad area of Web Accessibility. This years W4A is endorsed by the IW3C2 in cooperation with the ACM and its Special Interest Groups SIGWEB and SIGCHI. The general conference is supported by IBM Research, Microsoft, and Google, while the Web Accessibility Challenge is specifically sponsored by Microsoft, and the Student Awards are specifically sponsored by a Google. You can also find them indexed in the ACM DL and DBLP, and on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Lanyrd, Flickr, SlideShare, and Interaction-design.org.

I’m also pleased to see the fees – $250 for Students and $350 Professionals – are pretty reasonable for a two day international conference. What’s more I’m super pleased at the ACM Bibliometrics: publication history giving, very slightly below ACM ASSETS for citations (0.8) and 200 downloads per paper above them.

The top two papers for citations are:

1. Vigo, Markel and Arrue, Myriam and Brajnik, Giorgio and Lomuscio, Raffaella and Abascal, Julio (2007). Quantitative metrics for measuring web accessibility Proceedings of the 2007 international cross-disciplinary conference on Web accessibility, 1 (1), 99-107 : 10.1145/1243441.1243465
2. Bigham, Jeffrey P. and Ladner, Richard E. (2007). Accessmonkey: a collaborative scripting framework for web users and developers Proceedings of the 2007 international cross-disciplinary conference on Web accessibility , 1 (1), 25-34 : 10.1145/1243441.1243452

Both 2007 papers with 19 and 18 citations respectively – which seems to suggest the W4A is a slow burning conference for work that hos long term scientific value.

Full Disclosure: I may be biased as I did help set up this conference. But I think the figures and the Microsoft Academic Search Conference Trajectory speak for themselves.