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.

I wanted to call ourW4A paper ‘Define Accessibility!’ as both a challenge and a call, but I was overruled so it’s actually called ‘Understanding Web Accessibility and Its Drivers’. Here’s a sneaky peek at the abstract ahead of time! “Access is what the web is ‘about’, it is the motivation behind its creation, and it is the rationale behind HTML. The desire to pro­vide all users at CERN with the ability to access all documents was Tim Berners ­Lee’s primary goal, and this goal must also be carried through to equal access for all users.

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?

“We are not a company that is in competition with others, instead we are a community of researchers and good scientific research will only enhance our own scientific research and our understanding of the world through our scientific endeavours. Only by acknowledging the results of others searches for meaning, can we enhance our own search for meaning” Yuimaru is Okinawan dialect for a warm-hearted and friendly cooperative effort. When large projects were undertaken, neighbours often got together and the many hands made the work light.