Orca rich document browsing extension

• Year: 2008
• Amount: $8,000
• Focus: Accessibility

Work executed by Scott Haeger between January and March 2008 continued work on ARIA widget support, live region support, Collection bug fixes and Collection integration into Orca. See the final report for more details.

GNOME Outreach Program: Accessibility

• Year: 2008
• Amount: $10,000
• Focus: Accessibility

In March 2008, GNOME and Mozilla announced tigher, more formal collaboration. Mozilla joined the GNOME Foundation advisory board while reaffirming commitments to integrate with the GNOME platform for the XUL development platform. This $10,000 grant funded Gnome's Outreach Program for Accessibility. This development challenge had three goals:

1. Increase awareness of accessibility-related issues and how they relate to computer applications
2. Encourage and inspire people to work on those issues
3. Help the free software community improve its support for accessibility

Prize winners included WHO AND WHO AND WHAT DID THEY DO.

CSUN Accessibility Conference

• Year: 2009
• Amount: $10,000
• Focus: Accessibility

After seeing the good that came of 2008's support, Mozilla offered another grant to GNOME, leaving it to them to identify how the funds could be most effectively spent. After GNOME and Mozilla jointly announced the grant and shortly after it the funds were targeted to send developers to the 25th Annual International CSUN Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference. $6,933 of this grant money went toward travel and hotel rooms for participants in CSUN, and the remainder of the funds were applied to the creation of GNOME's booth at CSUN and GNOME's general accessibility fund.

GNOME Executive Director Stormy Peters reported, "The CSUN Conference is one of the premier technology conferences for people with disabilities, and by holding a GNOME accessibility hackfest at the conference, GNOME can ensure a diverse group of GNOME developers are immersed in the accessibility space with direct hands-on interaction with end users. The Mozilla grant also covered the cost of the GNOME booth at CSUN, in addition to the hackfest and travel.The booth was great. Most of the people we talked to were not aware that there were free software accessibility solutions available."

GNOME contributor Etain Isaacson reported:

CSUN is one of the largest and most important gatherings on the topic of technology and persons with disabilities. While most technology that was showcased at this event was proprietary and typically had a high price point, we were offering a free personal computing platform that was feature rich, easy to use, and accessible to people with many disabilities.

Because of different laws and regulations, technology accessibility is a consideration and concern primarily to large employers and government agencies. We were able to demonstrate our software and solutions to representatives of some of the largest employers in the United States (such as Social Security). We hopefully made our case that Free Software, besides being a competitive choice, is accessible by definition.

We held 3 different GNOME-related talks, where we demonstrated Orca, our screen reader, highlighted smaller assistive technology projects, and introduced participants to the culture of GNOME and the power of contribution.

In addition to our presence at the conference, an accessibility hackfest took place. During the hackfest we have made progress towards our GNOME 3.0 goals (DBus AT-SPI and GNOME Shell accessibility), and transitioned responsibilities as Willie Walker stepped down from his leadership role.

General Accessibility Support

• Year: 2010
• Amount: $10,000
• Focus: Accessibility

Based on the self-evident value of GNOME's activities in Accessibility, Mozilla renewed its support, offering $10,000 to be applied at GNOME's discretion to Accessibility projects such as the ORCA screen reader or the 2011 CSUN conference this coming March.