
	Peter Korn's Weblog The collected occasional commentary by Peter Korn, Accessibility Architect at Sun Microsystems, Inc.

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Wednesday February 27, 2008

In the 'TEITAC' home stretch!

With an odd mixture of joy, relief, and maybe a little bit of sadness (but mostly relief), I read that "The Telecommunications and Electronic and Information Technology Advisory Committee (TEITAC) will deliver its report to the Board on April 3, 2008" in this web news release on the webiste of the U.S. Access Board. This release notes that:

The Committee’s report will be the basis for the Board’s first update of the Section 508 standards since their original publication in 2000. The Board will review the Committee recommendations and issue an update proposal which will be available for public comment.

Along with my Sun colleague (and TEITAC Editorial Working Group member) Michele Budris, and colleagues from 40 other companies organizations, I have been working on the Update of the Section 508 Standards and the Telecommunications Act Guidelines since the first meeting in October 2006. During 26 days of face to face plenary meetings, 38 hours of teleconference plenary meetings, regular weekly meetings among 8 subcommittees (which were open to public participation) - not to mention meetings of more than a dozen ad-hoc task groups) - we have largely reached consensus on the draft of our recommendations that we will be delivering to the Access Board in early April. That meeting will be held at the Grand Hayatt in downtown Washington DC, followed by what is rumored to be a black tie reception. But before we all get to dress up, we have to finish the final stretch (a last 14 hours of meetings). (2008-02-27 14:58:15.0) Permalink

GNOME Foundation accessibility outreach program: $50k for accessibility work

Behdad Esfahbod, a member of the Board of the GNOME Foundation, has just announced today the GNOME Foundation Accessibility Outreach Program. This $50,000 program is funded by the GNOME Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, the Google Open Source Program Office, Ubuntu maker Canonical, and Novell, and provides grants for individuals to contribute to a collection of specific open source accessibility goals as part of the GNOME Accessibility Program.

For all the details, see the GNOME Accessibility Outreach Program website. Program technical judge, Orca project lead, and all around cool guy Willie Walker has a blog entry about the program you might also want to check out. (2008-02-27 14:01:16.0) Permalink