Is Accessibility Conformance an Elusive Property?

Well we undertook a study of validity and reliability of WCAG 2.0 and found that an 80% target for agreement is not attainable, when audits are conducted without communication between evaluators. Even with experienced evaluators the error rate is relatively high; and further, untrained accessibility auditors -be they developers or quality testers from other domains- do much worse than this. Read the full published text via ACM Author-izer Open Access on the publications page.

CS Impact Factors are ‘Pants’

To clarify, ‘pants’ is a British adjective meaning ‘rubbish’. And what I mean to say is that Impact factors for the broadly based CS journals are inaccurate and should not be trusted as a mark of academic progression of ranking. Why? Well let me tell you…

SIGWEB Annual Report

The last year has been an exciting one for SIGWEB. From the sponsorship of the large Web Science Conference, to that of the small Social Network Working Group; from the increase in student travel sponsorship (to $25,000pa), to our increasing volunteer effort; the SIG has been at work at all levels of our domain.

Accessibility for All

Last week I was talking about Deep Accessibility, and trying to define what it might be (who knows if I’m right). I said that in reality I thought it was pretty difficult to create a kind of Deep Accessibility, but that it was possible and necessary, and it was not just about disability but about all of us being able to access the information and functionality as we want or need. In a perfect example of how deep accessibility might be needed the UK Governments Research Councils UK (RCUK) swoop in with some requirements that makes my case.