SIGACCESS FY ’15 Annual Report July 2014 – June 2015 Submitted by: Shari Trewin, Chair SIGACCESS continues to refine its activities to meet member needs. This report highlights SIGACCESS Awards as well as the SIG’s conference, publication, and other activities. Awards SIGACCESS Best Paper Award Charles Fage, Léonard Pommereau, Charles Consel, Émilie Balland, and Hélène Sauzéon. 2014. Tablet-based activity schedule for children with autism in mainstream environment. In Proceedings of the 16th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility (ASSETS '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 145-152. DOI=10.1145/2661334.2661369 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2661334.2661369 SIGACCESS Best Student Paper Award Catherine M. Baker, Lauren R. Milne, Jeffrey Scofield, Cynthia L. Bennett, Richard E. Ladner. 2014. Tactile Graphics with a Voice: Using QR Codes to Access Text in Tactile Graphics. In Proceedings of the 16th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 75-82. DOI=10.1145/2661334.2661366 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2661334.2661366 SIGACCESS Outstanding Contribution to Computing and Accessibility Award This award is given every other year. For 2014, the recipient was Professor Vicki L. Hanson, Distinguished Professor of the Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences, Rochester Institute of Technology. Professor Hanson has made sustained and wide-ranging contributions to the field of accessibility, over a distinguished career including industry, academia, and policy organizations. Prof. Hanson’s innovations and research and publications are out in the world, being used every day by consumers and influencing researchers and developers. SIGACCESS Scholarship in Computers and Accessibility The SIGACCESS Scholarship Award aims to provide support for participation in the ASSETS conference for individuals who would not otherwise be able to attend. Practitioners, researchers, members of advocacy groups, or individuals with disabilities are eligible to apply. Applicants must have a demonstrated interest in accessible computing. Awardees will have the opportunity to actively participate in the ASSETS conference and gain experience and knowledge from interacting with experts in the field. The scholarship award is in the amount of $2,000. SIGACCESS awards up to five scholarships per year, pending availability of funds. The 2014 scholarships were awarded to Cynthia Bennet, Katherine Duchastel de Montrouge, Vincent Martin and Aditya Vashistha to attend ASSETS 2014. In addition, consistent with the mission of SIGACCESS, we provided travel support for an assistant that needed to travel with one of the recipients. ASSETS 2014 ACM Student Research Competition Winners Graduate Category First Place: Benjamin Gorman, University of Dundee "VisAural: a wearable sound localization device" Second Place: Vikas Ashok, Stony Brook University "Capti-Speak: A Speech Enabled Accessible Web Interface" Third Place: Valentyn Melnyk, Stony Brook University "Accessible Web Chat Interface" Undergraduate Category First Place: Mitchell Gordon, University of Rochester "Web Accessibility Evaluation with the Crowd" Second Place: Nata Barbosa, Syracuse University "Strategies an Inclusive Authentication Framework" Supporting ACM-W Scholarships Beginning with ASSETS 2010, SIGACCESS has supported the ACM-W Scholarship program by providing a complimentary registration to ACM-W Scholarship recipients. For ASSETS 2014, SIGACCESS hosted Andrea Fletcher, Georgia Institute of Technology. Significant Programs ASSETS Conference ASSETS 2014 was held in Rochester, New York, USA. The number of submissions was the highest in history at 106 with submissions from numerous countries spanning a variety of topics. The acceptance rate of 26%, was a little lower than recent history. Attendance was also the highest for any ASSETS conference, and the conference was profitable. As has become the norm, the conference featured an NSF sponsored Doctoral Consortium (see the January 2015 issue of the SIGACCESS Accessible Computing Newsletter). This consortium allowed doctoral students to present their dissertation topics and receive feedback during formative stages of their work. The conference also hosted a Microsoft Student Research Competition (SRC) event (see information about the winners of the competition above). The first place undergraduate winner, Mitchell Gordon, won 2nd place in the ACM Grand Finals. ASSETS 2014 continued the captioning competition introduced in 2013. Since captioning is an active area of research for a number of groups in the ASSETS community, we invited participants for a competition that was held at ASSETS 2014 in which teams used their technology to caption one or more of the sessions. Our aim was to promote research that will make it possible for ASSETS, and other organizations, to create captions of good quality at very low cost. ASSETS 2014 also continued the new submission venue for 'experience reports', and added a text entry challenge. Experience reports are direct reports from people with disabilities on their use of technology. The text entry challenge invited researchers to demonstrate alternative text entry methods, and conference attendees enjoyed testing and evaluating them. Another important innovation at ASSETS 2014 was a successful experiment with the use of Beam telepresence robots to enable attendance by two remote participants with disabilities, who would not otherwise have been able to attend. The remote attendees were able to participate in conference sessions, including asking questions, and to socialize during breaks. Going forward, we plan to explore how telepresence attendance could be managed as an accessibility accommodation within the funding and bandwidth limitations of the conference. The SIGACCESS Business Meeting, held at ASSETS, updated attendees on SIG activities and discussed ideas for new activities. We continued discussions regarding supporting workshops or other smaller events that were more focused with regard to topic or geographical location. ASSETS offers a mentoring program to authors who are new to the conference as well as authors who are new to presenting research or are submitting work to a new category. Authors who are not familiar with preparing papers in English can also seek assistance. Mentors are experienced ASSETS authors, providing advice to the prospective authors about how their work may fit with the conference and how to effectively present their ideas. Normally, mentoring does not include detailed copyediting. This year the mentoring program received 12 requests with two resulting in full papers being accepted for presentation at ASSETS 2014. ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing TACCESS is a quarterly journal that publishes refereed articles addressing issues of computing as it impacts the lives of people with disabilities. It provides a technical forum for disseminating innovative research related to computing technologies and their use by people with disabilities. In addition to regular issues published this year, expanded versions of top papers from the ASSETS 2013 conference appeared in special issue 6:2, and additional articles will be appearing in an upcoming issue. TACCESS also published a multi-part set of special issues on Speech and Language Interaction for Daily Assistive Technology, containing articles that investigate the intersections between computer accessibility and current work in computational linguistics. In early 2014, TACCESS announced an experimental program by which articles accepted for publication in the journal would be eligible for presentation at the ASSETS conference; two articles were presented at ASSETS 2014: "Distinguishing Users By Pointing Performance in Laboratory and Real-World Tasks" by Amy Hurst, Scott E. Hudson, Jennifer Mankoff, and Shari Trewin (http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2517039) and "Automatic Task Assistance for People with Cognitive Disabilities in Brushing Teeth - A User Study with the TEBRA System" by Christian Peters, Thomas Hermann, Sven Wachsmuth, and Jesse Hoey (http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2579700). SIGACCESS received positive feedback from ASSETS attendees about these presentations. Therefore, the program was continued for 2015: Manuscripts accepted to TACCESS by early June 2015 are eligible for presentation at ASSETS 2015. Several articles are expected to be presented at the upcoming conference under this arrangement. SIGACCESS Newsletter The SIGACCESS newsletter continues with its regular online publications: see http://www.sigaccess.org/community/newsletter/. SIGACCESS Website The SIGACCESS web site provides information about the SIG’s activities including awards and conferences as well as a repository of dissertations and theses, our newsletter, writing guidelines, and other resources, which may be of value to the community. Innovative programs SIGACCESS has developed several resources, which are made available to the community at large via the SIGACCESS web site. The first is a set of writing guidelines, which reflect current thinking on language for writing in the academic accessibility community. Certain words or phrases can (intentionally or unintentionally) reflect bias or negative, disparaging, or patronizing attitudes toward people with disabilities and in fact any identifiable group of people. Choosing language that is neutral, accurate, and represents the preference of the groups to which it refers can convey respect and integrity. As language changes