In Love Again; with the International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility. In Love Again! Well I don’t think it is any secret that in my opinion the last few years programme at ASSETS have included a number of papers I didn’t consider to be solid or particularly scientific, with a focus less on the technical aspect (the CS, that is the remit of the ACM and their SIGS) as opposed to sociology.

Thoughts on day three of the 13th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility. Day three started with yet another volley of good papers including our own (cough) in the Web Accessibility session Chaired by Jeff Bigham. The session also included excellent work from Sato et al from IBM Japan on whispered auditory cues for older users, and geo-political Web accessibility monitoring (VaMoLa) from Mirri et al at the University of Bologna; with a full room, a number of switched-on questions directed to each presenter ensued.

Thoughts on day two of the The 13th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility. A bazaar coincidence; the first session again provided to haul of good work! From ‘Humsher’ the soft-keyboard controlled (quite well, it seems) by humming different notes/tones; ‘ACES’, an Aphasia emulator which looks like it may provide us with a way of showing developers just the kind of missing aspects of language an aphasic user would experience (may favourite for today); and on to ‘We Need to Communicate!

Thoughts on day one of the The 13th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility. I’m not normally a cup-half-full kind of a guy, but the end of the first day of a good conference always produces a certain melancholia at the realisation that soon, these interesting academic conversations will be done. ASSETS 2011 produces just such a feeling because the quality of the first day has been excellent. The two most important sessions for me were the Keynote and the first session on Assistive Technology Design Paradigms.

‘Web pages judged on the classical dimension as being visually clean showed significant correlations with accessibility, suggesting that visual cleanness may be a suitable proxy measure for accessibility as far as people with visual impairments are concerned. Expressive designs and other aesthetic dimensions showed no such correlation, however, demonstrating that an expressive or aesthetically pleasing Web design is not a barrier to accessibility.’ In a few short weeks we’ll be off to the 13th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility which runs from 24-26 October, 2011 in Dundee, United Kingdom.