Activities

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

HCI Teaching

In 2012, I took on additional teaching responsibilities for Human Computer Interaction and Usability Engineering for Level 2 and Level 3 modules for our Bachelor's courses taught in the School of Computing; I also contribute a range of lectures and seminars on accessibility and inclusive design topics to other modules taught in the School.

Here's a (short) list of some useful online resources on HCI, usability engineering and inclusive design.

Conferences

W4A

I'm on the Steering Committee of W4A, the annual Interdisciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility, and was 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 next W4A 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:

Reviewing and Editorship

I edited a Web accessibility research Special Issue of New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia journal, which published extended versions of some of the best papers from W4A 2010.

I was Editor of a Web accessibility Special Issue of Disability and Rehabilitation: Assistive Technology journal, which published papers from authors who presented at W4A 2007.

In September 2011, I became a member of the Editorial Board of ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing.

I review papers for a number of journals and conferences. These have included:

I've served as examiner (external and internal) for 5 PhD theses in the field of accessibility and inclusive design (2 in the UK; 3 in Europe).

I was a contributor to the ITU/G3ICT e-Accessibility Policy Toolkit for Persons with Disabilities, providing input on software accessibility. The toolkit aims to support policy makers in implementing the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and was launched in 2009.

Professional Membership

ACM Professional Member since 2005, 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.