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From: Jennison Mark Asuncion
Date: Sun, Oct 19 2008 7:40PM
Subject: Announcing AEGIS - a 12.6m investment in open source accessibility (fwd)
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(*Apologies for the cross-posting.)

Hello,

Thought folks here might find this announcement from Peter Korn of Sun of
interest.

Jennison

Jennison Asuncion
LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/in/jennison

---------- Forwarded message ----------

From: Peter Korn = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =

I am *very* pleased to share with you news about the AEGIS project, a
ÿÿ12.6m investment in accessibility, with the vast majority of it focused
on open source solutions.

Rather than repeat here all that I have written about AEGIS already, I
will instead invite you to read about it in my blog:
http://blogs.sun.com/korn/ or check out the AEGIS website at:
http://www.aegis-project.eu/

I have worked in the field of accessibility for nearly 17 years, and on
open source accessibility almost a dozen of those years. In that time,
open source accessibility has become a deep and abiding passion.

I'm very proud that the techniques we have pioneered in the open source
community have since been adopted by Apple with the Macintosh &
VoiceOver,
and are being adopted by Microsoft with UI Automation. These same
techniques are enshrined in the report a 42 member committee delivered
to
the U.S. Access Board earlier this year (and which at this very moment
being reviewed by them as they work on their refresh of the Section 508
accessibility standard). And these techniques are at the core of the
AEGIS
project.

With AEGIS, over the next 3.5 years we will attempt to bring
programmatic
accessibility more fully to the web, and to the mobile world. With
AEGIS
we will also address a number of issues that still remain in
accessibility
on the open desktop. And while we're at it, we will bring a bunch of
new
and talented people into the open source accessibility community (you
should start seeing them showing up on our mailing lists and wikis in
the
coming months). We will also fund a number of the experts who have
already
made tremendous open source accessibility contributions - to enable to
them
to continue and to do even more. I'm sure they will shortly make their
voices heard on these lists and in the blogosphere. And we will
explicitly
fund a number of European disability organizations. These organizations
and many dozens of their members will be providing their expert input on
our work, and thoughtfully evaluating our prototypes, and perhaps
adopting
the solutions we come up with because they do a great job of meeting
their
needs.

Oh, and we'll also write a bunch of open source accessibility code.


This Sunday the 19th of October marks the 8th anniversary of the GNOME
Accessibility Project. AEGIS helps bring a fantastic 8th year to a
close,
and also serves to inaugurate the next 3.5 years!


Regards,

Peter Korn
Accessibility Architect & Principal Engineer,
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

From: Christian Heilmann
Date: Sun, Oct 19 2008 9:40PM
Subject: Re: Announcing AEGIS - a 12.6m investment in open source accessibility (fwd)
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This is amazing! I am very interested and happy to hear about this!