W4A 2009 Conference - Best Papers
From: ACM SIGACCESS Left Field
By: Yeliz Yesilada

W4A 2009 was co-located again with the Eighteenth International World Wide
Web Conference, in Madrid, Spain. Two days were full of great presentations
and discussions. The theme this year was "Web Accessibility for Older Users
Are We There Yet?". If you do research related to this area, I am sure you
will find lots of interesting papers in the proceedings. The full proceedings
is now available in the ACM Digital Library and the papers that won the best
paper awards are as follows: 

2009 Best Paper Award: About the relevance of accessibility barriers in the
everyday interactions of older people with the web 

 This paper reports key findings of a 3-year ethnographical study of the
 everyday interactions of older people with the web. The data consisted of
 in-situ observations and conversations with 388 older people while using
 myriads of web and computer technologies daily. The results revealed that
 the accessibility barriers that had a more negative effect on the daily
 interactions of older people with the web were due to their difficulties in
 remembering steps, understanding web and computer jargon and using the
 mouse, despite their willingness to use it. These obstacles were much more
 important than those caused by their difficulties perceiving visual
 information, understanding icons and using the keyboard. The prioritization
 of barriers was explained by two key aspects in ageing with new
 technologies, independency and inclusiveness, and a desired condition of web
 (user) interfaces, consistency in terminology. These results suggest that
 these three aspects should be considered carefully in enhancing web
 accessibility for older people, as well as allowing us to grasp older
 people's everyday web accessibility barriers. The paper discusses possible
 ways of making use of these findings to make the web more accessible to
 older people. 


2009 John M Slatin Award for Best Communication Paper: Prosumers and
accessibility: how to ensure a productive interaction 

 User-generated content (UGC) has become prevalent on the Web. It is not
 created by professional developers, but by prosumers: basic web users that
 also produce their own content. Thus, they lack any background, training,
 wherewithal, awareness and accountability regarding accessibility. We have
 extracted from top-used UGC sites a set of best practices to improve
 accessibility of UGC, focusing on the role the community itself plays in
 ensuring it. As we have merely compiled best practices, authoring tools and
 web content guidelines have not been redefined, but rather referenced and
 instantiated by UGC-specific recommendations. 

Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the 2009 International Cross-Disciplinary
Conference on Web Accessibililty (W4A) 2009, Madrid, Spain, April 20 - 21,
2009. 
http://portal.acm.org/toc.cfm?id=1535654&type=proceeding&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE