For some time now the Mozilla Foundation has been involved in supporting efforts to make Firefox and other Mozilla products more accessible to people with disabilities; see for example my blog post on Mozilla and accessibility. This document builds on the ideas in that post to propose an overall vision and strategy for possible efforts to improve the accessibility of Firefox and other Mozilla-related software and the web in general. Note that the ideas expressed in this post are my own and do not necessarily represent the official position of the Mozilla Foundation. It’s up to the Foundation board and to the new executive director to decide whether and how to implement this proposed strategy. Also note that my comments are primarily concerning the Mozilla Foundation; however the Mozilla Corporation has also taken some great steps to support accessibility (for example, hiring Tim Keenan to work full-time on accessibility QA and evangelism) and no doubt will do more in future. ...

This is my report on my activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending June 29, 2007. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others did this past week: Grants and related activities. I approved funding for a project to enhance the NVDA open source screen reader for Windows to better support Firefox. This actually happened some time ago, but I forgot to mention it: WebAIM completed its project to produce revised XUL accessibility guidelines and create a XUL accessibility evaluation tool. Henri Sivonen completed the third milestone on his current HTML5 conformance checker project. ...

This is my report on my activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending June 22, 2007. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others did this past week: Grants and related activities. Eitan Isaacson completed the intermediate milestone on a project we’re funding to complete development of the Accerciser accessibility test tool. (This work supports our efforts to improve accessibility for Firefox on Linux.) ...

This is my report on my activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending June 15, 2007. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others did this past week: Grants and related activities. I’m pleased to annouce that the Mozilla Foundation will providing some additional funding for Henri Sivonen’s work on HTML5 conformance checking. (Note that the code for the original HTML5 conformance checker is now available for checkout and build.) We’re also funding Scott Haeger to improve Firefox support in the Orca Linux-based screen reader. I also completed paperwork for a project for Leo Spalteholz to improve keyboard navigation in Firefox. (This was originally one of the Google Summer of Code submissions that we thought were worthy but for which we didn’t have slots). ...

As most of you know, the Mozilla Foundation (as distinct from the Mozilla Corporation) is a pretty small organization in terms of the number of people working for it. It’s therefore a big deal when we increase our numbers, and I’m quite pleased to tell you that David Boswell will soon be joining our ranks. David has been working with the Mozilla project for several years now, most notably as the president of the Mozdev Community Organization, the nonprofit organization behind the mozdev.org site for Mozilla-related development projects. He and others at the web design firm Alphanumerica were instrumental in organizing early Mozilla developer meetings and creating some of the first third-party Mozilla themes and add-ons. ...

This is my report on my activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending June 8, 2007. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others did this past week: Grants and related activities. I just did administrative stuff this week for existing projects. Next action(s): Get paperwork completed for one remaining project left over from the Summer of Code submissions. Do a blog post summarizing our accessibility-related efforts, as well as a brief meeting report on CSUN and G3ICT. ...

This is my report on my activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the weeks ending May 25 and June 1, 2007. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others did these past two weeks: Grants and related activities. I approved a Mozilla Foundation donation to the NetSquared Technology Innovation Fund; for more on NetSquared see Seth Bindernagel’s post. Henri Sivonen posted his final masters thesis describing his Mozilla Foundation-funded project to produce a prototype HTML conformance checker; the thesis and the conformance checker code are well worth checking out if you have an interest in this topic. The Foundation is now funding some follow-on work by Henri to produce an HTML5 parser for Java. I also approved matching funding from the Mozilla Foundation for a project sponsored by the Camino project to improve the scriptability of Camino. ...

Due to lack of time and taking off for the Memorial Day holiday, I didn’t do a public status report for this week; see the next status report for the week ending June 1, 2007.

This is my report on my activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending May 18, 2007. Most of the stuff I worked on is not yet ready for public announcement, hence the skimpiness of the report. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others did this past week: Grants and related activities. I completed paperwork on a new accessibility-related proposal, and worked on paperwork for a grant proposal originally submitted for Summer of Code. ...

This is my report on my activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending May 11, 2007. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others did this past week: Grants and related activities. I worked on paperwork for a grant proposal originally submitted for Summer of Code. Charles Chen and Peter Theissen presented a paper “Ajax Live Regions: Chat as a Case Example” at the recent W4A conference featuring work funded by the Mozilla Foundation. ...