Accessibility : Mozilla to give GNOME $10 000

The Mozilla Corporation has donated 10 000 dollars to the GNOME Foundation to help them in their accessibility efforts.

Like in 2008, Mozilla has decided to support the GNOME Foundation in their accessibility efforts. This financial support was to the tune of 10 000 dollars, with the President of the Mozilla Foundation Mozilla, Mitchell Baker declaring that: "The GNOME Foundation's commitment to accessibility improves the desktop and Internet experience for millions of people, and Mozilla is proud to support this work".

Notably used in numerous GNU/Linux distributions, the GNOME desktop environment comes with, for example, the Orca screen reader providing visual aspects developed by Sun Microsystems. Orca integrates speech and Braille generators which have been completely rewritten on the latest stable version of GNOME.

According to Willie Walker, manager of the GNOME accessibility team, the implication of Mozilla has allowed for ARIA support (Accessible Rich Internet Applications, W3C specification) to be provided in Orca, as well as other accessibility improvements. "All these helped make GNOME/Firefox a compelling free alternative to commercial products for the visually impaired. As a result, we're seeing users around the world using GNOME as their every day solution".

The donation of 10 000 dollars for 2010 will be used in part to send GNOME developers to the CSUN technology conference for handicapped people.