The worshop Natural Language Processing for Improving Textual Accessibility (NLP4ITA) is organized with the NAACL 2013 Conference in Atlanta, USA.

We are happy to announce that Prof. Kathleen F. McCoy will give a keynote speech at NLP4ITA (See our workshop program).

Aims

The workshop Natural Language Processing for Improving Textual
Accessibility (NLP4ITA)
aims to bring together researchers focused
on tools and resources for making textual information more accessible to people
with special needs including diverse ranges of hearing and sight abilities,
cognitive disabilities, elderly people, low-literacy readers and adults being
alphabetized among others.

Motivation and Topics of Interest

In recent years there has been an increasing interest in accessibility and
usability issues. This interest is mainly due to the greater importance
of the Web and the need to provide equal access and equal opportunity to people
with diverse abilities. The role of assistive technologies based on language
processing has gained importance as it can be observe from the growing number
of efforts (United Nations laws on universal access to information or
WAI guidelines related to content) and research in conferences and workshops
(W4A, ICCHP, ASSETS, SLPAT, etc.).
However, language resources and tools to develop assistive technologies
are still scarce.

This workshop will give an opportunity for individuals from different research
communities to present research findings, discover future challenges, and
discuss potential collaboration.