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.
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