The GNOME Foundation is running an accessibility outreach program, offering USD$50,000 to be split among individuals. This program will promote software accessibility awareness among the GNOME community as well as harden and improve the overall quality of the GNOME accessibility offering.

The program is sponsored by GNOME Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Google™'s Open Source Program Office, Canonical, and Novell. This is the second in a series of outreach programs coordinated and run by the GNOME Foundation.

“I'm excited about the GNOME accessibility outreach program because it continues the promotion of compelling accessible design as part of the mainstream developer culture. We believe the set of tangible and achievable tasks outlined will help improve the already good accessibility offering of the GNOME desktop,” said Willie Walker, Senior Staff Engineer of Sun Microsystems, Inc.

GNOME Outreach Program: Accessibility starts accepting applications on March 1st and will run towards the end of the year. There will be two tracks to the program: In the first track accepted individuals will work towards accomplishing one of the major projects nominated for the program, earning US$6,000 and can take up to six months to complete the task. The second track will reward contributors US$1,000 for fixing five bugs out of a pool of accessibility bugs nominated by the program judges.

“Novell is committed to both GNOME and to providing the best possible accessibility options to users of our SUSE Linux Enterprise offerings,” said Justin Steinman, director of Linux marketing for Novell. “Through working with the GNOME foundation and other partners, Novell is providing better computer access to all users as they work and interact in today's increasingly digital world.”

Individuals interested in participating in the program should check out www.gnome.org/projects/outreach/a11y. More information about the program may be found at the same location.