SE4ALL 2027

Software decides who can learn, work, bank, get care, and take part in public life. A large share of it still shuts out people with disabilities, older adults, and anyone facing a situational or cognitive barrier. At the same time, AI has moved into the heart of how software is built and used: it writes interface code, powers conversational agents, and increasingly makes decisions on a user’s behalf.

That is both a risk and an opening. The same models that can describe an image, caption a video, simplify dense text, or restructure a cluttered page are the tools that could close accessibility gaps at a scale that manual work has never reached, but only if we engineer and evaluate them with that goal in mind.

SE4All is the first ICSE workshop dedicated to software engineering and AI for accessibility and inclusion. It treats accessibility as a software engineering problem: how we capture it in requirements, test and audit for it, build tools and pipelines around it, share the work between people and AI, and hold the results to account. The workshop keeps its feet in software engineering methodology and practice while drawing on the accessibility, HCI, and AI communities.

The timing is deliberate. The EU Accessibility Act is now in force, WCAG 3.0 is taking shape, and ICSE 2027 is hosted in Dublin, at the heart of the European policy landscape driving demand for accessible software.

What we want from the day

We want people to leave with new collaborators and a clear sense of what to work on next. Alongside paper presentations, the programme makes room for short practitioner talks and facilitated breakout groups. The notes from those groups feed a short community research roadmap that we circulate to everyone who attends.

SE4All has four goals:

• Establish a lasting ICSE community around software engineering and AI for accessibility and inclusion.
• Produce a shared research agenda and open problem set, capturing where AI helps, where it falls short, and what the software engineering community should take on next.
• Surface concrete validation questions, such as how to benchmark AI-assisted accessibility tools and what counts as evidence that a remediation is correct.
• Connect software engineering researchers with accessibility and HCI specialists, industry practitioners, and disability advocates.

Who should take part

The workshop is open to anyone working where software engineering and AI meet accessibility and inclusion. We especially welcome experience reports and contributions from engineers and researchers with lived experience of disability. Their perspective keeps the work grounded in the needs of the people it is meant to serve, and we would rather build that in from the first edition than add it later.

Accessibility of the workshop itself

SE4All is committed to being an accessible event. Guidance for authors and presenters will include practical accessibility advice, and participants are welcome to write to the organisers about access needs at any point before or during the workshop.

Contact

Questions about the workshop go to the general chair, Muhammad Sohaib Ayub, at muhammadsohaib.ayub@universityofgalway.ie.

Call for Papers

SE4All 2027, the International Workshop on Software Engineering and AI for All, invites submissions on software engineering and AI for accessibility and inclusion. We welcome research papers, tool papers, empirical studies, position and vision papers, and industrial experience reports.

We read the scope broadly. A paper need not be about disability in the narrow sense to fit, as long as it speaks to building software that works for a wider range of people. If you are unsure whether your work belongs here, write to us and ask.

Topics of Interest

Topics include, but are not limited to:

• AI and large language models across the software lifecycle (generating, repairing, reviewing, and testing software) and what this means for accessibility and inclusion
• Human-AI collaboration, human-in-the-loop workflows, and crowdsourcing for building and maintaining better software
• Automated testing, analysis, and quality assurance for accessibility, usability, and inclusive design
• Requirements, architecture, design, and maintenance practices that treat accessibility and inclusion as first-class concerns
• Empirical studies, mining software repositories, datasets, benchmarks, and tools for inclusive software engineering
• Accessibility and inclusion in emerging and AI-driven interfaces: conversational agents, generated user interfaces, mobile, web, IoT, and smart environments
• Trust, dependability, verification, fairness, and responsible engineering of AI-enabled software for diverse users
• Human and social aspects of software engineering, including diversity, equity, standards and policy in practice (WCAG, the EU Accessibility Act, Section 508), and education
• Industrial experience reports, case studies, and lessons learned from building software for all

Submission Types

Submission Guidelines

All submissions must be in PDF and must conform to the IEEE Conference Proceedings formatting guidelines (10 pt, IEEEtran). Submit through the SE4All HotCRP site: https://icse2027-se4all.hotcrp.com/

Each submission receives at least three single-blind reviews from the programme committee. Reviews assess novelty, relevance to the workshop scope, technical soundness, clarity, and the potential to spark discussion at the workshop. Position and emerging-ideas papers are judged on the strength of the idea rather than on how complete the results are.

Accepted papers will be published by IEEE in the ICSE 2027 Companion Proceedings. At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the workshop and present the work.

The official publication date of the workshop proceedings is the date the proceedings are made available by IEEE. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of ICSE 2027. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

Important Dates

All deadlines are anywhere on Earth (AoE).

Contact

For questions about the call or the workshop, please contact the organising chair, Muhammad Sohaib Ayub, at muhammadsohaib.ayub@universityofgalway.ie.