This is funding to support a workshop where approximately 40 invited experts from industry, developer communities, research and educational institutions, and persons with disabilities can have in-depth, face-to-face discussions to further ongoing standardization efforts in support of comprehensive access to information and accessible user interfaces for persons with disabilities on computing platforms that adopt free and open standards, such as Linux, BSD, AIX, MacOSX, and Solaris. Increasingly, persons with disabilities are turning to Linux and other open source environments to prototype and develop consumer driven solutions to common, and not so common, computing challenges, industry and business are adopting open environments for various computing tasks, and technology providers are developing solutions to serve these growing needs through packaged distributions and technical service plans. Clearly, comprehensive accessibility support cannot be achieved without a comprehensive agreement among affected stakeholder groups. Yet, the diverse nature of the technology that constitutes today's open platforms also makes it difficult to achieve a comprehensive and cohesive layer of accessibility support; the heterogeneous nature of toolkits, component inter process communication models, libraries, and applications has made the development of robust and effective assistive technologies difficult, at best. This workshop, which is the first of its kind, will be convened in early 2005 by the Accessibility Workgroup of the Free Standards Group (FSG), and hosted by The Archimedes Project at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu. The workshop will provide the most appropriate forum for finalizing proposals for industry-wide accessibility standards where FSG work has already begun, for developing a "road map" for additional open source technologies and standards to support comprehensive accessibility on open platforms; and for reaching broad stakeholder consensus on a common layer of accessibility support that can be deployed and maintained on multiple platforms and can serve as the basis for future collaborative research to provide multiple, cost effective, interoperable, heterogeneous and accessible products. The workshop organizing committee consists of leaders from industry and academia with widely recognized expertise in assistive technology. The organizers will make a concerted effort to ensure broad participation, by personally inviting appropriate representatives of stakeholder communities worldwide, and by announcing the workshop on targeted e-mail lists and on the Web.
Broader Impacts: Open computing platforms are important and meritorious environments for individual and institutional users alike, and especially for the research community. Achieving standards to support comprehensive accessibility in such environments will benefit persons with disabilities, students and researchers with disabilities, as well as those without (who must now constantly address the basics of accessibility support rather than creative and innovative approaches to more complex questions), governmental agencies and educational institutions that are now legally required to support accessibility, and developers of assistive technology who will find it easier to create more useful technologies than those available today. These benefits will be available world-wide, in developing and developed nations alike, because neither cost nor access to the technology itself will be a barrier to anyone's participation, either as an end user or as a technical contributor.
