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IBM helps Firefox reach disabled
Published: August 15, 2005, 10:27 AM PDT
By Dinesh C. Sharma
Special to CNET News.com
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IBM will donate 50,000 lines of code to the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox Web
browser to make it friendly for people with visual and motor disabilities, Big
Blue said Monday.

The contribution would allow the addition of dynamic hypertext markup language
accessibility technology to version 1.5 of Firefox, the company said. With this
technology, Web pages can be magnified, automatically narrated or navigated from
a keyboard instead of from a mouse, IBM said. For instance, the amount of
tabbing required to navigate a spreadsheet can be minimized for people with
mobility disabilities.

In addition, developers can work on "rich Internet applications" tailored for
the disabled or elderly. Such applications can run without requiring people to
install additional programs on their PCs.

IBM has already helped integrate into Firefox support for Microsoft Active
Accessibility, an industry standard for access technologies such as screen
readers, which read software and content aloud.
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"IBM's commitment to further Firefox's capabilities and reach people who have
disabilities marks an important technical advancement for Firefox," Mitchell
Baker, Mozilla president, said in a statement.

The market for access technologies is large. Between 750 million and a billion
people globally have a speech, vision, mobility, hearing or cognitive
disabilities, according to the World Health Organization. In the U.S., the
Rehabilitation Act requires federal agencies to provide access to electronic
and information technology for all employees and citizens, irrespective of
their abilities.