Gnome Foundation Awards US$ 50,000 for Work on Accessibility

Feb 27, 2008

The Gnome Foundation is awarding a total of US$ 50,000 for individual contributions to Gnome software accessibility.

The aim is to make the Gnome desktop more accessible to users with vision or motion challenges, and increase awareness of accessibility-related issues among programmers.

The "Gnome Outreach Program" is open for applications starting March 1. There will be two tracks to the program: In the first track accepted individuals will work towards accomplishing one of the major projects nominated for the program, earning US$6,000 and can take up to six months to complete the task. The second track will reward contributors US$1,000 for fixing five bugs out of a pool of accessibility bugs nominated by the program judges.

"Accessibility (or a11y as we write it) is one of the key features of GNOME, like internationalization and usability. GNOME technology works hard to make applications built on top of it be accessible without any extra effort on the application developer's side." says Behdad Esfahbod, who is managing the program for the Gnome Foundation. Esfahbod continues, "There are (accessibility) shortcomings, however, and this program will help people identify and fix them." The Gnome Foundation will also be receiving financial support fort he "Gnome Outreach Program" from the Mozilla Foundation, Google, Canonical, and Novell.

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