Activities

I'm involved in a number of activities as part of my professional work.

Conferences

W4A

I'm on the Steering Committee of W4A, the Interdisciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility, and will be Special Issue Chair for W4A 2010 (in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA in April 2010).

I previously served as General Chair of W4A 2009, which was held on 20-21 April 2009 in Madrid, Spain, and was Programme Chair for W4A 2008, held in Beijing in April 2008. You can read a Review of W4A 2008 in the ACM SIGAccess news letter #92 (September 2008).

W4A was started in 2004 by Simon Harper, Yeliz Yesilada and Carole Goble of the University of Manchester as a conference dedicated to developments in the field of web accessibility for disabled people. It's held annually in conjunction with the WWW Conference, the world's largest annual Web conference, and has attracted a growing reputation for a friendly yet well-respected event that attracts some great papers and people from the field of web accessibility research and practice.

For more information on the 2010 conference, plus details of previous conferences, see the W4A conference web site.

Other Conferences

I was part of the Organising Committee for the first Accessible Design in the Digital World Conference (ADDW), held by the Digital Media Access Group here in Dundee in August 2005.

The second ADDW, ADDW 2008, was held in York in September 2008.

I've held, or taken part in, many conference sessions on various topics relating to web accessibility, including at:

BCS HCI (Liverpool 2008)
Institutional Web Managers' Workshop (IWMW) (2002, 2007, 2008)
ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computing Science Education (ITICSE) (Dundee 2007)
Internet Librarian International (Birmingham 2003)
Association for Learning Technology Conference (ALT-C) (2000, 2001, 2002)
ACM Conference on Universal Usability (CUU) (Arlington 2000, Vancouver 2003)
WWW Conference (Hong Kong 2001, Madrid 2009)
ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS) (Arlington 2000)

Reviewing and Editorship

I've reviewed papers for a number of journals and conferences, including:

Interacting with Computers;
ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing;
Universal Access in the Information Society (UAIS);
Disability and Rehabilitation: Assistive Technology;
International Journal of Interactive Technology and Smart Education (ITSE);
ACM SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing: 2010;
ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computer-Human Interaction (CHI): 2009, 2010;
ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS): 2006, 2007, 2008;
W4A 2006, 2007, 2010.

I have also served as examiner as part of the review process for three accessibility-related PhD studies.

Professional Membership

ACM Professional Member, and member of the ACM Special Interest Groups on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) and Accessible Computing (SIGACCESS).

Usability Professionals' Association (UPA), Scottish Chapter. For a time I was an editor of the Scottish UPA web site.