IBM Makes Software, Web Accessibility Push
From: InternetNews.com - 03/22/2007
By: David Needle

IBM intends to make accessibility a more important part of IT education, with
the goal that all applications would eventually be built with the disabled in
mind. A recent survey conducted by IBM showed that accessibility is not
covered in the majority of IT classes. To instill accessibility in IT
education, the company will team with six universities and the US Department
of Education to create and distribute a wealth of repeatable learning
materials that will expose student developers to the concepts of
accessibility and help them build more accessible software. "To create a
truly inclusive society, all forms of information technology need to be more
accessible," said the Department of Education's Dr. Bonnie Jones. "If we
can't do this, people with disabilities land on the wrong side of the
'digital divide.' We have to capture the intelligence and imagination of our
next generation of IT developers now." By influencing education, IBM hopes to
create a generation of developers that will create applications that allow
for increased productivity and Web sites that more people can access. Three
students recently won an IBM Open Document Format (ODF) contest for their
code that checks word processing documents for adherence to the ODF. The
company is also involved in a variety of other accessibility projects,
including a software-hardware project to help people with tremors use a
mouse, and a system that transfers spoken words to text. Universities
involved in the imitative include the University of Illinois, California
State University at Long Beach, Georgia Tech, the University of Toronto, and
the Rochester Institute of Technology. 

Read the entire article at:
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3667471

Links:
Department of Education - Office of Special Education Programs
http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/osers/osep/index.html

IBM Accessibility
http://www-304.ibm.com/jct09002c/us/en/university/scholars/skills/accessibility/index.html
