You may not believe it, but ACM Hypertext and Social Media conference maybe just he place your your HCI and/or Accessibility work. With average downloads per article running at 384 and average citations per article at 6.87 (according to ACM bibliometrics) this 100 person conference is comparable to CHI. So, now we’ve established it’s a good conference - what kind of work is there for the errant HCI’er? Well a quick look at the schedule should tell you, but lets look at the award candidates for the two awards given at Hypertext.

Update: Draft paper now online. I told you that accessibility-in-use would start to become more accepted. Apparently the W4A Reviewers - a notoriously tough bunch - seem to agree as they’ve accepted our paper ‘Evaluating Accessibility-in-Use’ to the W4A 2013 Conference in Rio! This acceptance makes triple for our work (Hypertext 2013, Web Science 2013) on Coping strategies and behaviours - and the sets of Web tactics that are used to enact them.

We undertook a study of validity and reliability of WCAG 2.0 and found that an 80% target for agreement is not attainable, when audits are conducted without communication between evaluators. Even with experienced evaluators the error rate is relatively high; and further, untrained accessibility auditors -be they developers or quality testers from other domains- do much worse than this. Read the full published text via ACM Author-izer Open Access on the publications page.

“We believe that high-complexity interaction, defined by choice and flexibility, is the key problem. Choice and flexibility are normally seen as positive in that, from a technology perspective, ‘more’ adds-value; however we disagree and propose a counter intuitive investigation of the benefits of the opposing principles centred around inflexibility and constraint. The object of this PhD project is to empirically test this belief.” The World Wide Web (Web) is a vast information and communication resource which is now seen as vital for commerce, social interaction, welfare, and citizen empowerment; however, it still remains ‘off-limits’ to the older user.

We believe that a combinatorial approach to evaluation may be more effective than those applied by individual tools and engines. The object of this PhD project is to empirically test this belief. Understanding website conformance to specifications, guidelines, accessibility and usability requirements is currently a complicated - and for the most part unachievable - process. A problem amplified where human interaction is required for evaluation, or when different evaluation engines produced different results.