Following criticism from the Open Source Industry Association (OSIA) over its ambition to have the Office Open XML (Open XML or OOXML) format accepted as an international (ISO) standard, Microsoft's group product manager for Microsoft Office, Gray Knowlton, spoke with Computerworld about why the world needs two standard document formats.

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.

"...This document provides a review and analysis of guidelines and articles relating to the needs of older people with Web accessibility needs due to ageing, and compares these with the needs of people with disabilities as already addressed in WAI guidelines. The focus is particularly on Europe but applies internationally as well.

Video and audio support will soon be built directly into Firefox, by way of the free Vorbis and Theora codecs, and Mozilla is using the opportunity to advance multimedia accessibility for hearing-impaired and seeing-impaired users.

The GNOME Foundation is happy to announce a substantial donation from the Mozilla Corporation to benefit the GNOME Project's accessibility efforts. The donation will help continue the collaborative efforts between GNOME and Mozilla on Accessibility.

SCO has filed its response to the proposed amicus brief by Wayne Gray, and it agrees with Novell on it -- they don't want Wayne Gray butting in to this appeal either. Novell said it was irrelevant, and SCO agrees...

After Sun Microsystems was bought by Oracle, the last one began to fire many ex-Sun's workers. There are two lead developers of ``GNOME Accessibility'' and ``Orca'' (screen reader for blind people) projects among this big quantity of fired people. One of them have written an open letter to Oracle to review their decision.

Novell has filed a response to Wayne Gray's Motion asking if he can file an "amicus" brief. The introduction says it all...

The GNOME Project has received two grants for a total of $15,000 from Mozilla and from the F123.org-Mais Diferenças partnership for accessibility work. Mozilla has once again stepped up to support GNOME accessibility (a11y) work with a $10,000 grant. The F123-Mais Diferenças partnership has awarded a grant of $5,000 in total.