It is common sense that communication, conveying information between a sender and recipient (primarily human beings) by encoding, sending and decoding, goes beyond the exchange of verbal information and includes many multi-layered non-verbal cues.

By nature the past decades of Assistive Technology (AT) and eAccessibility focused on access to the explicit and well defined aspect of verbal communication. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) provides computational representations of this information and allows efficient automated or supported Accessibility with standard or Assistive Technology.

Recent advances and the emerging potential in domains like sensor and tracking technology as well as pattern recognition and semantic reasoning invite and allow going beyond accessibility of and AT for explicit aspects of communication. Accessibility of and AT for much less formalized information cues which are mostly described with the term “non-verbal communication” is seen as a new challenge.

This session calls for presentation and discussion of R&D addressing Accessibility and AT of non-verbal communication. It intends to set up a platform for discussion on issues like

• Importance of non-verbal communication and the impact of reduced access; target groups and benefits of better access to non-verbal communication (e.g. blindness, cognitive disabilities, hearing impairment, cultural diversity)
• Concepts and methods for describing, structuring, defining marking-up/notating and analyzing non-verbal cues for computation for Accessibility and AT
• Concepts and methods for displaying non-verbal information cues in the context of established verbal and other explicit ways of communication for people with disabilities
• Requirements engineering and user centered design for accessible non-verbal communication
• Reasoning “to make sense” out of many and multi-layered non-verbal communication cues to allow efficient and usable inclusion in accessible communication settings
• Application Scenarios and Prototypes: AT and accessibilityAccessibility and AT of simple presentations, structured co-located meetings and unstructured social interaction in everyday life
• …

Accessibility of non-verbal communication is a rather new and challenging field. This session aims at bringing together researchers and developers to establish a new domain in the field of Accessibility and AT. Therefore we call for contributions addressing conceptual ideas, the definition of the domain, as well as first prototyping and experimenting which help to frame this new and challenging domain.

Contributions to the STS have to be submitted using the standard submission procedures of ICCHP.

Chairs

• 
  Andreas Kunz, ETH Zürich
• 
  Stephan Pölzer, Johannes Kepler University Linz
• 
  Klaus Miesenberger, Johannes Kepler University Linz