I previously blogged about the Mozilla Foundation and the CSUN conference on information technology and persons with disabilities. As noted in the post, the Mozilla project and Firefox are really gaining traction with people concerned about web accessibility, thanks to the hard work of people like Aaron Leventhal. If you’re interested in this topic (and I think we all should be) then be sure to check out Aaron’s recent interview in the online publication Voice of the Nation’s Blind.
In the interview Aaron discusses how he got into accessibility-related development originally, what brought him to the world of Mozilla, and what the current state of Firefox accessibility is. He also talks about why it’s hard to make applications accessible, especially across multiple platforms, how AJAX and DHTML are making things worse, and how the new technology of accessible DHTML could make things better. Finally he discusses the future of assistive technologies (AT) and the AT industry, and how open source could change the world of accessibility.
I think accessibility is a very important topic for the Mozilla project in general and for the Mozilla Foundation in particular. I hope to post an article soon to discuss in much more depth why I think this is so; until then please read Aaron’s interview to get the inside story from someone who knows much more about accessibility than I do.