Accessibility

I discuss my involvement with NVDA and NV Access.

I’ve written and published a new proposed high-level strategy for Mozilla-related accessibility efforts. Note that this is not a detailed roadmap for future work, and not a firm commitment to fund or perform such work. Rather it is intended to provide a context within within which we can make overall decisions about where we should concentrate funding and effort. This is especially important because our resources are very much finite, and we will need to make decisions about what we should do and what we should leave undone or leave to others to do. ...

Some of you may recall that about a year ago the Mozilla Foundation provided a grant to NV Access, an Australia-based nonprofit organization dedicated to developing NVDA, an open source screen reader designed for blind users of Windows applications like Firefox. This grant went to support NV Access hiring a developer (James Teh) to work full-time on NVDA. (The Mozilla Foundation had previously provided a smaller grant as well.) I’m happy to pass on the news that NV Access has now received financial support from Microsoft sufficient to allow Mick Curran (the original developer of NVDA) to also work full-time on NVDA. From my point of view this is a significant development for both NV Access itself, which has taken another step towards sustaining itself and the NVDA project for the long term, and for blind users of Windows. ...

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending February 29, 2008. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. Grants and related expenditures The GNOME Foundation announced the GNOME outreach program for accessibility, which the Mozilla Foundation helped fund. CAs and related issues I gave preliminary approval to the application from VeriSign to add a new EV-capable root (bug 402947). I also worked on EV-related applications from Comodo (bug 401587), GeoTrust (bug 407168), and thawte (bug 407163). Public communication David continued work on various www.mozilla.org-related tasks. Conferences and events Zak spoke at a number of Norwegian universities February 25-27 on open source and Mozilla-related topics. Gerv attended FOSDEM. I continued work on arrangements for CSUN. Other Gerv worked on a script to assist with the proposed Bugzilla product/component reorganization. Upcoming events and activities I’m planning to be in Mountain View on March 12 and at the CSUN conference on March 13 in Los Angeles CA. I’m also planning to attend the Freedom to Connect conference March 31 and April 1, 2008 in Silver Spring MD, and (if possible) the Berkman@10 conference May 15-16 in Boston MA. Zak will be speaking at the PHP Quebec Conference March 12-14, and other events later in 2008.

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending January 18, 2008. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. Grants and related expenditures I’m happy to announce a major new grant from the Mozilla Foundation to NV Access to support development of the NVDA open source screen reader for Windows; the NVDA developers blog has all the details. Scott Haeger completed the final milestone on his Foundation-funded project to improve rich document browsing in the Orca screen reader for Linux. For more information see the GNOME wiki pages for Firefox 3.0 ARIA widget support in Orca, Firefox 3.0 Live Region support in Orca, and integrating the Collection interface into Orca. Codethink Ltd completed its Foundation-funded study on the feasibility of migrating the AT-SPI accessibility API to use D-Bus. I got a grant agreement in place for another major new grant to be announced later. CAs and related issues I reviewed the applications from KISA and WISeKey, tentatively approved them, and started the two-week public comment periods prior to final approval. For more information see bugs 335197 and 371362 respectively. Other Gerv is recovering well from his recent surgery. David moved out to California (not without some excitement). I completed my migration to Google Apps, as discussed in my last status report. (However I’ve postponed my blog migration for a week or two until I have more spare time.) Upcoming trips and events I’ll be attending (at least part of) the CSUN conference March 10-15 in Los Angeles CA, and the Freedom to Connect conference March 31 and April 1 in Silver Spring MD. Zak will be speaking at the Southern California Linux Expo February 8-10 in Los Angeles, the PHP Quebec Conference March 12-14 in Montreal, and other events later in 2008. A reminder: We’re still accepting donations to the Mozilla Foundation through our directed giving program. Help support Bugzilla, Camino, SeaMonkey, and the Mozilla accessibility project, as well as general Foundation activities for the coming year. ...