GNOME Foundation Announces Program to Sponsor Accessibility Projects

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org>]

GNOME Foundation Announces Program to Sponsor Accessibility Projects
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BOSTON, Mass—February 27, 2008 — The GNOME Foundation is running an
accessibility outreach program, offering USD$50,000 to be split among
individuals. This program will promote software accessibility awareness
among the GNOME community as well as harden and improve the overall
quality of the GNOME accessibility offering.

The program is sponsored by GNOME Foundation, Mozilla Foundation,
Google™'s Open Source Program Office, Canonical, and Novell. This is the
second in a series of outreach programs coordinated and run by the GNOME
Foundation.

“I'm excited about the GNOME accessibility outreach program because it
continues the promotion of compelling accessible design as part of the
mainstream developer culture. We believe the set of tangible and
achievable tasks outlined will help improve the already good
accessibility offering of the GNOME desktop,” said Willie Walker, Senior
Staff Engineer of Sun Microsystems, Inc.

GNOME Outreach Program: Accessibility starts accepting applications on
March 1st and will run towards the end of the year. There will be two
tracks to the program: In the first track accepted individuals will work
towards accomplishing one of the major projects nominated for the
program, earning US$6,000 and can take up to six months to complete the
task. The second track will reward contributors US$1,000 for fixing five
bugs out of a pool of accessibility bugs nominated by the program
judges.

Individuals interested in participating in the program should check out
www.gnome.org/projects/outreach/a11y. More information about the program
may be found at the same location.

Read the full announcement at:
http://www.gnome.org/press/releases/gop-a11y.html