Since the first proposal in 1989, the World Wide Web rapidly evolved to become a primary media for information and communication. The Web encompasses access to education, employment, research, business, social interaction, and much more. Thus the Web provides an unprecedented opportunity for people with disabilities to access information and to participate equally in all aspects of society.Today the Open Web Platform is continuing to converge with other media including television, radio, telephony, print, and others. As it evolves, matures, and expands to become more available on yet more devices it also becomes more complex. For example, today the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has over 300 published W3C Recommendations (web standards) and over 500 W3C Working Group Notes (supporting technical reports) reflecting the extent of maturity and complexity of the Web.This evolution provides exciting new opportunities to improve accessibility for people with disabilities. In particular, the increasing types of media, devices, gadgets, sensors, and services that are connected through the Web open up avenues for new generations of accessibility solutions. For example, several applications show how the camera, compass, and position detection and mapping services that are now natively built into practically every modern mobile device can be used for accessibility guidance.However, this evolution also provides exciting new challenges that we as the accessibility community need to address collaboratively. As these multitude of core web technologies emerge, converge, and evolve, it is ever more important to equip them with accessibility features from their inception to form a solid foundation for accessibility. It is also critical to continue dedicated efforts to better address:

• rapidly evolving areas, such as mobile accessibility and touch interfaces;
• accessibility needs, such as of people with cognitive and learning disabilities;
• overlapping user needs, such as of older people and mobile web users.

Since 1997 the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has been developing strategies, guidelines, and resources to make the Web accessible to people with disabilities. It includes Working Groups that focus on the development of accessibility guidelines and techniques as well as a group to ensure that W3C specifications provide support for accessibility for people with disabilities (PFWG) and a group to help increase the incorporation of accessibility considerations into research on web technologies (RDWG). WAI welcomes participation by researchers, developers, users, and more. It provides an open forum for collaborative effort to increase accessibility of the Web for people with disabilities.Together we can weave more accessibility into the Web to make it a better place for all.This Special Thematic Session (STS) invites papers on web accessibility, especially those that focus on ways forward in accelerating the implementation of web accessibility. This includes but is not limited to:

• rapidly evolving areas, such as mobile accessibility and touch interfaces;
• accessibility needs, such as of people with cognitive and learning disabilities;
• overlapping user needs, such as of older people and mobile web users.

Chair

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  Shadi Abou-Zahra, W3C Web Accessibility Initiative