Overview of the ASSETS 2017 conference

This year was the 19th edition of the ACM SIGACCESS International Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2017), which took place in October in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. The ASSETS conference is the premier computing research conference exploring the design, evaluation, and use of computing and information technologies to benefit people with disabilities and older adults. We set a new attendance this year with 200 participants from across the globe. In addition to a rich technical program, an increase in industrial sponsorship allowed the conference to support several receptions, including an event at the National Federation of the Blind on Halloween evening. SIGACCESS made several awards during this year's conference. The SIGACCESS ASSETS Paper Impact Award was awarded to Keith Edwards, Elizabeth Mynatt and Kathryn Stockton for their 1994 paper "Providing access to graphical user interfaces---not graphical screens". This paper is one of the first to raise and tackle the challenge of providing screen reader capabilities in graphical user interfaces. It proposes that translation of the GUI should be done at a semantic, rather than syntactic level. The 2017 Best Paper Award went to "Evaluating the Usability of Automatically Generated Captions for People who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing" by Sushant Kafle and Matt Huenerfauth. The 2017 Best Student Paper Award went to "Technology-Mediated Sight: A Case Study of Early Adopters of a Low Vision Assistive Technology" by Annuska Zolyomi, Anushree Shukla, and Jaime Snyder. We thank Clayton Lewis from University of Colorado Boulder for Chairing the SIGACCESS Awards Committee and Anne Marie Piper from Northwestern University for chairing the 2017 ASSETS Best Papers Committee.