TECHNICAL PAPERS

Author Information about COVID-19 (March 20th, 2020):

We recognize that among the many impacts of COVID-19, a number of authors are needing to cancel planned work with representative users and are worried about how this will affect their ability to complete planned submissions. While submissions will be evaluated against the same criteria as in previous years, we encourage authors to consider new and creative ways of engaging with stakeholders and establishing the validity of their ideas. Critical reflections on the lessons learned through experimentation with new techniques and methods can serve as novel contributions to the research community. We encourage authors to consider how their current experiences could be framed as such. To further support authors, the submission deadline for technical papers has been extended by two weeks (other deadlines adapted accordingly).

Important Dates

Call for Technical Papers

The ASSETS conference is the premier forum for presenting research on the design, evaluation, use, and education related to computing for people with disabilities and older adults. We invite high-quality original submissions on topics relevant to computing and accessibility.

Submissions should present significant contributions to design, systems, tools, scientific understanding, methodology, or social issues. Relevant topics include (but are not limited to) new enabling technologies, studies of how technologies are used by people with disabilities, explorations of barriers to access, and evaluations of accessibility education methods. It is expected that, in most cases, a paper’s research contributions will be validated through research activities conducted within the target user groups. Papers that include a technical contribution without being validated through research activities with representative users are unlikely to be accepted.

Authors should refer to the General Writing Guidelines for Technology and People with Disabilities when preparing submissions.

Accepted technical papers will be presented at the conference and will appear in the conference proceedings. For the accepted papers, at least one author must register as the presenter by the early registration deadline to be included in the proceedings. All authors of accepted papers will be invited to submit extended versions of their papers to a special issue of the ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS).

Authors who have never published at ASSETS can request a mentor. Mentors will be experienced ASSETS contributors, who can help authors to improve their submissions. See the Call for Mentors page for more information.

Submission Guidelines

Format and Length

Quick facts:

Update May 04, 2020: Authors will use ACM Master Article templates and prepare their manuscript in single column format using Word or LaTeX. A critical aspect of this change is that what the reviewers see during the review process (single column) is different from how the final publications will appear (which will include multi-representations including a traditional two-column PDF). As we transition to a new format and publishing process, our goal is to keep paper length consistent with prior years. As such, the page limit remains 10 pages for long papers and 5 for short papers in the final two-column format. However, we realize that it is hard to estimate these lengths when working with the single-column submission format. We recommend that authors consult ACM’s guide for estimating formatted page length (please see Section 5 of the workflow: https://www.acm.org/publications/taps/word-template-workflow), which provides estimates for different combinations of word, figure, and table counts. We ask that authors do their best to use these estimates to prepare their papers. Papers will not be desk-rejected based on page-count, but contributions should be scoped similarly to previous years.

Update May 5, 2020: We have become aware of a problem with the MS Word template (Latex authors are not affected). Instructions for a workaround are available on the submission template page: https://assets20.sigaccess.org/submission_templates.html

As in recent years, the length of technical papers is 10 pages and the length of short papers is 5 pages; note that references do not count towards these pages limits. However, due to our new template and post-processing steps, the number of pages in the final PDF may differ from the submitted source file. We recommend that authors prepare a manuscript of ~7,500-10,000 words to equate to the prior 10-page limit. Papers with many figures and tables should err on the shorter side of the word count range. Shorter submissions are also welcome, as the paper's length should be commensurate with its contribution.

Submissions should use templates that can be found in the Submission Templates page.

Video figures up to five minutes long may be optionally submitted as supplementary material. Video figures are strongly encouraged for papers that introduce a novel system or interaction technique. Video figures should be in .mp4 format and should be less than 50 MB.

Accessible Submissions

Accessible PDFs

Your PDF file must be accessible. PDFs created with LaTeX are very difficult to make accessible, unless you edit the output directly in Acrobat; we strongly suggest using Microsoft Word due to the easier accessibility workflow. It may take several hours to make your file accessible (adding alt tags, etc.), so be sure to leave time before the submission deadline to do so. Please refer to the instructions on Creating an Accessible ACM Conference Paper for information on how to accomplish this.

Please note that this year, it is expected that papers will be made accessible both at the time of review and for the final submission. Paper submissions that are not accessible may be desk rejected. If you have questions regarding how to make your paper accessible, please contact proc-assets20@acm.org. And if you think you could benefit from a mentor to help you with this process, please contact mc-assets20@acm.org.

Accessibility Mentorship

It is important that submissions are accessible. If you are new to this process, refer to the Accessibility Mentorship page.

Accessible Video Figures

Video figures, like papers, must be accessible. For videos to be accessible, include both audio narration (so that the contents of the video can be understood by someone with a visual impairment) as well as text captions (so that the video can be understood by someone who is deaf or hard of hearing). Text captions can be burned directly into the video as subtitles (preferred), or else closed-captioning metadata files (*.srt, *.ttml, *.vtt) can be uploaded as additional supplementary material.

Anonymous Submissions

ASSETS will utilize a fully-anonymous review process for Technical Papers, in which the authors must anonymize their paper submissions. We will follow the standard of SIGCHI in which all author names, affiliations, and contact information is to be removed. You should not anonymize references to your prior work (these are needed as part of the review process). Rather, you should refer to all prior work in the third person. While it may not be possible to remove all clues to who the authors are, we expect authors to do their best. Authors who encounter difficulty applying this anonymization policy to their research are encouraged to contact the program chairs for additional guidance.

Videos should be anonymized for review (i.e., do not include author or institution names in videos).

Review Process

Submissions that do not meet formatting or accessibility guidelines, are not properly anonymized, are out of the topical scope of the conference, or are otherwise deemed non-competitive by the program chairs may be rejected without review. Otherwise, submissions will be peer-reviewed by an international panel, per the ASSETS policy on Program Committees.

For ASSETS 2020, authors with sufficiently high review scores will have an opportunity to submit a “Rebuttal” after viewing the reviews, prior to the final acceptance decisions. The window of time for this rebuttal period is only a few days, so authors should plan to make time for this. See Important Dates, above.

Submissions MUST contain substantial original, unpublished material. Please refer to the ACM policy on plagiarism for guidance. Writing Guidelines are available to help authors choose appropriate language for writing about technology and people with disabilities. Authors of accepted papers should note that papers may be made publically available in the ACM Digital Library as far as two weeks in advance of the conference date.

Short vs. Long Papers

Recently ASSETS introduced a “Short Technical Papers” category. Short papers are meant to capture more focused, concise research contributions than full papers. Short papers, like full papers, are rigorously peer-reviewed, archival publications. Short papers are not for works-in-progress, incomplete work, etc. (Works-in-progress should be submitted to the Posters and Demos track).

Short paper submissions should use the same template as full-length technical papers, but are limited to five pages. Accepted short papers will appear in the main conference proceedings, and will be orally presented at the conference (in a half-length presentation slot). Short papers should adhere to the same anonymity and accessibility standards as full papers, and are also welcome to submit accompanying video figures, particularly if they introduce a novel system or interaction technique. For either short or long papers, you are not obligated to fill the entire page quota; a good rule of thumb is that the length of your paper should be proportional to the contribution size.

How to submit

Please submit your anonymized, accessible paper to Precision Conference no later than Thursday, May 7, 2020, 5 p.m. PDT.

Further Information

For further information or any questions regarding technical paper submissions, please contact the Program Chairs, Karyn Moffatt and Hugo Nicolau, at pc-assets20@acm.org.