At a Glance
Sun products and the Solaris desktop provide advanced, no cost, accessibility features and assistive technologies. On the developer's front, Sun's new generation of development tools and platform interfaces makes it possible for mainstream developers to design accessible applications for a variety platforms with little experience or knowledge of accessibility.
Sun's award-winning approach to providing built in support for users and developers, together with a suite of assistive technologies, have been contributed to the open source community. This action has dramatically expanded the opportunities for community based innovation in accessibility.
AEGIS Project
Sun is part of the AEGIS project, a €12.6m investment in accessibility, with the vast majority of it focused on open source solutions. AEGIS is a major research and development investment in building accessibility into future mainstream Information & Communication Technologies, focused on the development of open source accessibility infrastructures, developer tools, user-interface components, and end-user solutions.
AEGIS was made possible in large part by the European Commission through a grant under the Seventh Framework Programme funding for Research on eInclusion, in service of the ICT for Inclusion Unit of the Information Society and Media Directorate-General. In addition to the European grant contribution of €8.22m, matching funds from AEGIS consortium members provide the balance of the €12.6m research and development investment.
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Spotlight
With the release of OpenSolaris 2008.11 we now have an accessible install process. This allows users to complete the installation process independently. This is a work in progress, but we are working from the belief that we really should let the user requirements drive the architecture and not the other way around. Try it out and send us your feedback. Orca is an extensible open source screen reader and magnifier for blind and low-vision users on UNIX/GNOME systems. Orca is in OpenSolaris, Ubuntu, Fedora Core, and other LINUX releases. Sun Accessibility Architect Peter Korn has been named one of Federal Computer Week magazine's Federal 100 Award winners. This recognition identifies Korn as one of 100 individuals who have had a significant impact in the government's use of information technology in 2008. Both Solaris and OpenSolaris bundle a screen reader, on-screen keyboard, desktop themes and more at no additional costs. Many of the accessibility features can be seen in demonstration videos done using OpenSolaris.
Accessibility and Section 508
Sun Microsystems, Inc. supports government efforts to improve IT accessibility. Sun contributes to these efforts through participation in the Section 508 standards development process, developing products to meet the Section 508 requirements, distributing development environments that make accessibility design easier, and contributing the many Assistive Technologies distributed in Solaris to the Open Source Community.
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