Just got this via the webaim mailing list:

I am very pleased to share with you news about the AEGIS project, a 12.6m investment in accessibility, with the vast majority of it focused on open source solutions.
Rather than repeat here all that I have written about AEGIS already, I will instead invite you to read about it in my blog: http://blogs.sun.com/korn/ or check out the AEGIS website at: http://www.aegis-project.eu/. I have worked in the field of accessibility for nearly 17 years, and on open source accessibility almost a dozen of those years. In that time, open source accessibility has become a deep and abiding passion.
I’m very proud that the techniques we have pioneered in the open source community have since been adopted by Apple with the Macintosh & VoiceOver, and are being adopted by Microsoft with UI Automation. These same techniques are enshrined in the report a 42 member committee delivered to the U.S. Access Board earlier this year (and which at this very moment being reviewed by them as they work on their refresh of the Section 508 accessibility standard). And these techniques are at the core of the AEGIS project. With AEGIS, over the next 3.5 years we will attempt to bring programmatic accessibility more fully to the web, and to the mobile world. With AEGIS we will also address a number of issues that still remain inaccessibility on the open desktop. And while we’re at it, we will bring a bunch of new and talented people into the open source accessibility community (you should start seeing them showing up on our mailing lists and wikis in the coming months). We will also fund a number of the experts who have already made tremendous open source accessibility contributions - to enable to them to continue and to do even more. I’m sure they will shortly make their voices heard on these lists and in the blogosphere. And we will explicitly fund a number of European disability organizations. These organizations and many dozens of their members will be providing their expert input on our work, and thoughtfully evaluating our prototypes, and perhaps adopting the solutions we come up with because they do a great job of meeting their needs. Oh, and we’ll also write a bunch of open source accessibility code.
This Sunday the 19th of October marks the 8th anniversary of the GNOME Accessibility Project. AEGIS helps bring a fantastic 8th year to a
close, and also serves to inaugurate the next 3.5 years!
Regards,
Peter Korn
Accessibility Architect & Principal Engineer,
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

How cool is this! It is great to see that the open source world is going full steam with accessibility and now we need to make sure that what they do reaches the people that need what they built and doesn’t get lost in IT department red tape.

I’ll get in contact with Peter and see how we can collaborate

I am now a proud user of a 24 inch monitor at work and I realized that when I read large texts, the amount of white on the screen starts to hurt my eyes. Therefore I’ve written a small bookmarklet to black out part of the screen on demand and have a link top left to show and hide the blinds that cover the rest of the content. The blinds are fixed position so that I can scroll the content behind them. I also add padding to the bottom of the document to have enough scrolling space.

Here’s a blog without reading blinds:

The same blog with reading blinds on:

The bookmarklet is hosted on my server, to install it simply drag the following link to your links toolbar: Reading Blinds

I am right now at @media Ajax 2008 getting ready to go on stage to deliver my “Scripting Enabled” talk, explaining how the main issue about accessibility is that we just don’t talk enough to each other. Technology is never really the boundary we have with accessibility, it is that we don’t understand how people work and what technology is capable of.

Scripting Enabled - How to make the web more accessible with JavaScript and Flash

My talk at @mediaAjax 2008 about Scripting Enabled, what lead to it, what we can use now and where we are going with this. Now also available as Audio

Read "Scripting Enabled - How to make the web more accessible with JavaScript and Flash" with Easy SlideShare

Watch "Scripting Enabled - How to make the web more accessible with JavaScript and Flash" right here, right now

Links in the presentation

• Hack injecting lang attributes into twitter feeds, looping them through the Google translation API
• Presentation of accessibility hacks that are in use on Yahoo sites
• Yahoo Live
• Yahoo Live deaf chatroom
• Antonia Hyde’s presentation on learning disabilities and online video
• Easy YouTube
• Yahoo Video - turn JavaScript on and off
• Timed captioning hack for YouTube
• Annotations hack for YouTube
• Tubecaption.com
• SoundManager2
• JavaScript Karaoke Engine
• JW Player
• JW Player with Audio descriptions and captions
• Access Enabling Ajax
• WebVisum
• IBM’s social accessibility project
• Scripting Enabled

At dconstruct this year, Ian Forrester and Rain Ashford of the BBC backstage interviewed several unsuspecting victims about all kind of things buzzing in the internet scene these days. By a stroke of luck, Bill Thompson was out and about to interview me about my upcoming conference on the 19th and 20th of September in London, England: Scripting Enabled

Here’s the video:

• Watch the video on normal YouTube
• Watch the video on Easy YouTube
• Watch higher quality video on blip.tv

I thank everyone involved for the chance to tell people about the event and I am looking forward to seeing you there!

We are one step closer to turning online video into a great resource for the hard of hearing or even for non-native speakers to learn languages better. Google just announced support for closed captioning in YouTube videos:

• YouTube Blog Post
• Detailed information on YouTube support

Congratulations, and thank you, YouTube, I personally learnt a lot from captions in TV shows and videos and if that catches on there is nothing from stopping us to crowdsource captioning.