W4A 2008

One World, One Web: Surfers become Designers? Co-Located with the Seventeenth International World Wide Web Conference, in Beijing, China. The Conference will be held on Monday 21st and Tuesday 22nd April 2008. WWW2008 Logo The World Wide Web (Web) is returning to it's origins, surfers are not just passive readers but content creators. Wiki's allow open editing and access, blogs enable personal expression, Flicker, YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook encourage social networking by enabling designs to be 'created' and 'wrapped' around content. Indeed it seems that only the Web infrastructure supporting expression is immutable and invisible to the user. Template based tools such as iWeb, Google Page Creator, and RapidWeaver enable fast professional looking Web site creation using automated placement, with templates for blogging, picture sharing, and social networking, these tools often require publishing to a system specific server, such as '.mac'. In this case we wonder if the conjugation of authoring tools and user agents represents an opportunity for automatically generated Web Accessibility or yet another problem for Web Accessibility? Will form based and highly graphical interfaces excluded disabled users from creation, expression and social networking? What problems exist, what are the upcoming problems, what solutions are required? What about the accessibility of the content designed and created by surfers? Finally, what effect will this have on the wider Web? We pose the question: What happens when surfers become authors and designers?

In this case topics of interests include (but are not limited to):

* Investigations focused on Template Based Technology; * User Experimentation looking at Social Networking and Freedom of Expression; * GUI and Form investigations with regard to access; * How Wiki's and Blogging Tools effect accessibility of content creation; * Evaluation and Validation tools and techniques for Wiki and Blogging tools; * Web Content Creation Tools; * Web Authoring Guidelines; * Design and best practice to support Web accessibility; * Technological advances to support Web accessibility; * End user tools; * Accessibility guidelines, best practice, evaluation techniques, and tools; * Psychology of end user experiences and scenarios; * Innovative techniques to support accessibility; * Universally accessible graphical design approaches; * Design Perspectives; * Adapting existing Web content; and * Accessible graphic formats and tools for their creation. This CfP was obtained from WikiCFP