Well as you can expect, after the W4A 2013 and W4A Camp 2013 there comes the trip report. I can tell you that the research was excellent and the quality of discussion was awesome. But don’t take my word for it have a look at the videos for each session (below). Social Events every night at the W4A. Thanks to Hiro Takagi for the photo.So is it just me who thinks the work is good and influential?

As David Sloan tells us the W4A is ’the biggest annual gathering of the web accessibility research community.’ and this year’s Keynote - By Prof. Jim Hendler - was a ‘Doozy’. Indeed, you don’t have to take my word for it you can see Jim Hendler at the W4A12 for yourself - recorded (apologies for the adverts) live and saved on the W4A USTREAM Channel! In brief Jim, made the case that accessibility goes beyond that of simple access by disabled users into something much deeper, and more opaque.

This year the W4A be running a joint W4A WWW 2012 panel on accessibility and its definition at WWW 2012. This will be on Wednesday the 18th at WWW2012 but will be free entry to W4A Pass holders. The organizers (of which I’m one) suggest that there are many different views of web accessibility with many questions to be answered: what is the relationship between web accessibility and usability? Is web accessibility for all or is it strictly for disabled people?

A new departure this year for the W4A - on Wednesday morning of conference week there will be the first W4A conference / camp; and it’s free! The organisers say: It is free, anyone can attend BUT there are no facilities - we may be ‘reclaiming the streets’, squatting in the hotel lobby or bar, under a tree in the park, or in someones hotel room, and sniffing for Wi-Fi where ever we can get it.

This years W4A was yet again a triumph, especially Bebo White’s ‘Geezer’ - doing William proud for this second Memorial Address! Now, normally I pick out a few technical papers which I think pretty good, however, departing from convention I decided to summarise each paper, both technical and communication, in as near to 140 characters or two sentences as possible. In this way I hope that anyone interested will be able to quickly understand the gist of the paper and use this understanding to decide if they want to read further.