Dear Colleagues,

The W4A'15 deadline is approaching fast (January 23), so we hope to see a paper from you on improving accessibility of the Web, Mobiles, and Wearables for people with and WITHOUT disabilities. And make your students aware of these offerings:

1) Full coverage IBM travel award to students with physical disabilities;
2) $1,250 to PhD students participating in Google’s Doctoral Consortium;
3) $2,000 and $1,000 to the best full and short papers respectively.

Happy New Year!
Yevgen Borodin, PhD

Research Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department
Stony Brook University

President and CEO, Charmtech Labs LLC www.captivoice.com
“Listen to Anything You Want to Read”

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We welcome you to submit your best work on improving accessibility of the Web, Mobiles, and Wearables for people with and without disabilities to the International Web for All Conference (W4A’15), conveniently co-located with WWW’15 and MobiSys’15.

W4A’15 (www.w4a.info) will take place in Florence, Italy (May 18-20):
- Intuit will award $2,000 and $1,000 to the best technical and communication papers
- The Paciello Group will award the winners of the Accessibility Challenge
- ABILITY Magazine will highlight the winners of awards in a special editorial
- IBM will provide travel grants to both grad and undergrad students with disabilities
- Google will sponsor 6 PhD students to participate in the Doctoral Student Consortium 
- Submission deadlines: Jan 23rd, Notifications: March 4th

As you know, devices are getting smaller, and more of them are now wearable: smart glasses, smart watches, and smart clothing are all working their way into our lives and onto our bodies. These devices are online, web-accessible, and increasingly interconnected. As with many technologies that have come before, wearable devices present incredible opportunities for improving accessibility for people with and without disabilities, but also present accessibility challenges in ensuring that people are able to equally benefit from them regardless of disability, context or situation. Acknowledging the importance of this topic, the theme of the 12th International Web for All Conference is “The Wearable Web”.

Don’t be deterred by the theme; we invite your best work on improving and understanding access for people across the accessibility continuum. Papers are expected to detail technical solutions and scientific insights into Web, Mobile, and Wearable technologies addressing diverse user needs. Areas of interest include but are not limited to the following: age, cognition, culture, education, emotions, dexterity, disability, diversity, health, hearing, income, infrastructure, language, learning, literacy, mobility, situation, society, and vision.

The keynote speech on the "Sense and sensibility: smartphones and wearable technologies to support seniors" will be delivered by Lorenzo Chiari who is a Professor and the Vice-Director of the Health Sciences and Technologies - Interdepartmental Center for Industrial Research at the University of Bologna. On the close of the 1st day, join us for the evening of wine, food, and live music – with a Classical performance by Lia Martirosyan. The “William Laughborough” after-dinner talk "Riches Beyond Measure: A New Frontier in Web Accessibility" will be given by Kevin Carey, the Chair of the Royal National Institute of Blind People, UK.

Don’t come just for W4A’15 – stay for the entire week! W4A is conveniently co-located with WWW’15 and MobiSys’15 conferences. MobiSys’15 is the top research conference dealing with all aspects of mobile systems: http://www.sigmobile.org/mobisys/2015/cfp.php.
And WWW’15 (http://www.www2015.it/) is the best and the biggest Web research conference attended by famous Web researchers and practitioners, such as Sir Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the Web). Among other events, we will hold a joint WWW/W4A panel session devoted to the “Wearable Web” theme.