IBM Makes Software, Web Accessibility Push From: InternetNews.com - 03/22/2007 By: David Needle IBM intends to make accessibility a more important part of IT education, with the goal that all applications would eventually be built with the disabled in mind. A recent survey conducted by IBM showed that accessibility is not covered in the majority of IT classes. To instill accessibility in IT education, the company will team with six universities and the US Department of Education to create and distribute a wealth of repeatable learning materials that will expose student developers to the concepts of accessibility and help them build more accessible software. "To create a truly inclusive society, all forms of information technology need to be more accessible," said the Department of Education's Dr. Bonnie Jones. "If we can't do this, people with disabilities land on the wrong side of the 'digital divide.' We have to capture the intelligence and imagination of our next generation of IT developers now." By influencing education, IBM hopes to create a generation of developers that will create applications that allow for increased productivity and Web sites that more people can access. Three students recently won an IBM Open Document Format (ODF) contest for their code that checks word processing documents for adherence to the ODF. The company is also involved in a variety of other accessibility projects, including a software-hardware project to help people with tremors use a mouse, and a system that transfers spoken words to text. Universities involved in the imitative include the University of Illinois, California State University at Long Beach, Georgia Tech, the University of Toronto, and the Rochester Institute of Technology. Read the entire article at: http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3667471 Links: Department of Education - Office of Special Education Programs http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/osers/osep/index.html IBM Accessibility http://www-304.ibm.com/jct09002c/us/en/university/scholars/skills/accessibility/index.html