About "bleeping" time...

Big Thanks to Big Blue for this very generous donation.  Hopefully,
this will truly make Mozilla Firefox more accessible.  Again, this
donation is even more important, not only because Mozilla is a
freeware product, but because it is open source as well.

Paragraph for the article:
The market for access technologies is large. Between 750 million and a
billion people globally have a speech, vision, mobility, hearing or
cognitive disabilities, according to the World Health Organization. In the
U.S., the Rehabilitation Act requires federal agencies to provide access to
electronic and information technology for all employees and citizens,
irrespective of their abilities.

My comments:
It seems quite good that a mainstream article considers access
technologies to be more than a fringe market, like it rather seems
now.  If an increasing amount of businesses start to recognize the
importance of access, then perhaps these technologies won't be so
high-priced in the future.

Thanks to Randy for this post.
-Chris O

On 8/16/05, Randy Hayhurst <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> IBM helps Firefox reach disabled
> 
> By Dinesh C. Sharma, CNET News.com
> 
> Published on: August 15, 2005, 10:27 AM PT
> 
> 
> 
> IBM will donate 50,000 lines of code to the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox Web
> 
> browser to make it friendly for people with visual and motor disabilities,
> 
> Big Blue said Monday.
> 
> 
> 
> The contribution would allow the addition of dynamic hypertext markup
> 
> language accessibility technology to version 1.5 of Firefox, the company
> 
> said. With this technology, Web pages can be magnified, automatically
> 
> narrated or navigated from a keyboard instead of from a mouse, IBM said. For
> 
> instance, the amount of tabbing required to navigate a spreadsheet can be
> 
> minimized for people with mobility disabilities.
> 
> 
> 
> In addition, developers can work on "rich Internet applications" tailored
> 
> for the disabled or elderly. Such applications can run without requiring
> 
> people to install additional programs on their PCs.
> 
> 
> 
> IBM has already helped integrate into Firefox support for Microsoft Active
> 
> Accessibility, an industry standard for access technologies such as screen
> 
> readers, which read software and content aloud.
> 
> 
> 
> "IBM's commitment to further Firefox's capabilities and reach people who
> 
> have disabilities marks an important technical advancement for Firefox,"
> 
> Mitchell Baker, Mozilla president, said in a statement.
> 
> 
> 
> The market for access technologies is large. Between 750 million and a
> 
> billion people globally have a speech, vision, mobility, hearing or
> 
> cognitive disabilities, according to the World Health Organization. In the
> 
> U.S., the Rehabilitation Act requires federal agencies to provide access to
> 
> electronic and information technology for all employees and citizens,
> 
> irrespective of their abilities.
> 
> 
> VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
> To join or leave the list, send a message to
> [log in to unmask]  In the body of the message, simply type
> "subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
>  VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
> http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html
> 
>


VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
To join or leave the list, send a message to
[log in to unmask]  In the body of the message, simply type
"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
 VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html