IBM Launches Initiative For the Aged, Disabled

IBM has announced it will work with colleges across the globe, to help student developers make software more accessible to the elderly and people with disabilities. This initiative builds on IBM’s ongoing efforts to promote universal access of software applications, web sites and documents.

The University of Illinois, California State University at Long Beach, Georgia Tech, University of Toronto and the Rochester Institute of Technology are some of the universities who are already working with IBM to build a repository of repeatable learning materials to incorporate into everyday computer programming classes.

The purpose of the Accessibility Common Courseware Exchange for Software Studies (ACCESS) repository is for professors around the world to collect, store and share information around accessibility technologies.

IBM’s accessibility software, courseware, teaching, training tools and books will be available to the academic community at no-charge. Universities around the world will have an opportunity to contribute turnkey lessons, tools and courseware to this open repository. The ACCESS repository will be hosted and supported by the IBM Academic Initiative and can be found on the Web. The University of Illinois recently added an online course about universal Web site design to the repository. The lessons aim to educate web developers and administrators about the disability access issues faced by people with disabilities and instruct how to design Web resources to improve accessibility for people with disabilities.

Jon Gunderson, Director of Information Technology Accessibility at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign said, “This repository will be an invaluable aid to professors in any institution of higher education teaching technology accessibility. And success of this worldwide repository is dependent on collaboration and participation of professors around the world.”

As a precursor to this initiative, IBM posted material for computer science classes this past fall, and launched a contest where students competed to provide software code that would make documents more accessible. IBM and the U.S. Department of Education are today congratulating the winners of that contest, in which nearly 400 students from 111 universities in Canada, China, Japan and the U.S. participated.