ASSETS

I am pleased to introduce the technical program of ASSETS 2014, the Sixteenth International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility. Our call for participation generated an outstanding set of technical paper, poster, demo, experience report, and text entry challenge submissions. A number of submissions for the ACM Student Research Competition and doctoral consortium were also received. The overall technical program is strong and balanced thanks to the efforts of the many area chairs who solicited and evaluated this work.

I especially thank our program committee, 51 senior members of our community who, along with 5 advanced doctoral students, carefully read the 106 submitted full technical papers from 20 countries and collectively produced 318 reviews. Of these submissions, 28 papers were selected for inclusion in this year's program for an overall technical paper acceptance rate of 26%. The posters and demos committee reviewed another 25 demo submissions choosing 18 for acceptance, and 56 poster submissions, choosing 28 for acceptance. I would also like to acknowledge the five members of the best paper committee who were given the difficult task of evaluating the most highly rated technical papers, selecting both a best paper and best student paper to be announced in the closing session.

This year's program is organized as follows. We begin Day 1 with a keynote presentation by this year's winner of the ACM SIGACCESS Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computing and Accessibility. This is followed by our first paper session examining independent navigation by blind users and technology to reduce social isolation. Our second paper session addresses accessibility-promoting practices and tools and will be followed by our first poster and demo session. We will then move to the campus of the Rochester Institute of Technology for demos, a special poster session featuring the work of participants in both the student research competition and the doctoral consortium, and our first of two receptions hosted by the Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences and the National Institute for the Deaf at RIT.

Day 2 begins with a paper session on information access, examining efficient ways for blind users to navigate text and understand graphics. A second paper session on objects and interfaces looks at the use of 3D interfaces, the use of 3D printing in special education environments, and the first of two TACCESS presentations. TACCESS presentations are new this year and allow conference participants to hear directly from an author of work recently published in ACM's Transactions on Accessible Computing. Following this, we will hear presentations by this year's Student Research Competition finalists (finalists chosen on the basis of their poster presentations the previous evening). We will then conduct our SIGACCESS business meeting, hear about work in support of accessible interaction (including our second TACCESS presentation), and have our second poster and demo session. Following a reception at the Strong Museum of Play we will return to the conference hotel where people can participate in accumulating data for the text entry challenge.

Our final day begins with a look at applications and games for use by several target populations followed by a second paper session on issues of communication and website use. Our final paper session explores mobility issues and will be followed by the closing session featuring announcements of the winners of the student research competition, the text entry challenge, the captioning challenge, the best paper, and the best student paper.

I am confident you will find this year's program both valuable and memorable and join Sri in welcoming you to Rochester!