EU project that concerns ARIA

Dear all,

I wanted to email the list with details of a European project that I am
now involved in which has a reference to ARIA. It is AEGIS (Open
Accessibility Everywhere: Groundwork, Infrastructure, Standards). It is
being managed by Sun and many agencies are included in the work
including RNIB.

*From the project summary: "The project seeks to determine whether 3rd
generation access techniques will provide a more accessible, more
exploitable and deeply embeddable approach in mainstream ICT (Desktop,
Rich Internet and Mobile Apps). We develop and explore this approach
with the Open Accessibility Framework (OAF) through which we address
aspects of the design, development and deployment of accessible
mainstream ICT. The OAF provides embedded and built-in accessibility
solutions, as well as toolkits for developers, for "engraving"
accessibility in existing and emerging mass market ICT-based products,
thus making accessibility open, plug and play, personalised and
configurable."

*Relevance to ARIA: RIA's is one of the three core technologies that are
being investigated and WAI-ARIA is specifically mentioned. AEGIS is
planning development of multiple, open source, web application
frameworks, which will enable the deployment of accessible RIAs and this
will be achieved via the ARIA spec. Planned also is development of
toolkits for the creation of accessible web apps and development of ARIA
support in web browsers and other user agents in order to expose and
translate that information to the platforms 3rd generation accessibility
APIs and from there to Ats.

*How I am involved: I am involved, in the first instance, in the context
of use field studies, particularly with regards to desktop and Rich
Internet Applications. We have to determine how people use these
technologies, what the problems are and how they want to use the
technologies in the future. I have to approach users and experts to give
their feedback. This information will then inform the development of the
technologies from the project.

Hope this is useful info.

Thanks
Sally

Sally Cain
Digital Accessibility Development Officer
Royal National Institute of Blind People
UK



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Received on Wednesday, 15 October 2008 16:22:46 UTC