Introduction to Special Issue on Web Accessibility

Abstract

Introduction to Special Issue on Web AccessibilityWeb accessibility is an important area of research which is concerned with making digital content available to anyone, irrespective of their context and situation, from users of small devices such as Personal Digital Assistance devices (PDAs) or cellular phones, to people living with various degrees of different disabilities (blind and visually-impaired, deaf and hearing-impaired people).Interestingly, it has often been the case that accessibility research has yielded results which go well beyond their immediate field of application and finally contributes to theoretical debates in many other area disciplines that work on access to (digital) information.For instance, work on semantic tagging of different kinds of web content (see, for instance, Harper and Bechhofer 2005, Ferres et al. 2007) ultimately helps ease data exchange and information retrieval among companies, government organizations, etc.In short, accessibility research often benefits a much broader community than its original target one.The papers in this special issue of The New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia fall squarely in this category, providing a broad range of information and a tool that could potentially benefit a much larger audience than originally intended.This special issue has its origin, primarily, in the 2008 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A 2008), the fifth in the series, co-located with the International World Wide Web conference held in Beijing, China.The W4A conference series (http://www.w4a.info/2008/) is a rapidly growing gathering of the accessibility community.Since 2004, the W4A has published leading cross-disciplinary research, academia, commerce, and industry.In 2008, the W4A published 12 papers on a broad range of topics, and author representation was diverse, covering 13 countries of all five continents.Of those papers, two were chosen for inclusion in this special issue.These two papers were significantly extended by the authors and went through a second review process.Obviously, information and the right tools are of paramount importance in order to achieve universal access to digitally encoded information.Given the size and the rate of growth of the World Wide Web, it is becoming more and more apparent that coarse HTML annotation will just not be enough, and richer metadata will have to be generated.To do this, companies, governments and academia will need to know who knows what with respect to accessibility and how to improve the status quo.The first paper in this special issue is a large study of the perception towards accessibility by academia, industry and government.Part of what is important in this study is the size and nature of the sampling: 613 participants from all Brazilian states took