Chris Leung and Project:Possibility
December 18th, 2008 by Gen KanaiThe NY Times has a nice article on a recent voluntary effort to make software for vision-impaired or physically disabled people that mentions the Mozilla Foundation’s support: Entrepreneurial Edge – Software That Opens Worlds to the Disabled.
To date, Project:Possibility has operated without revenue and without pay for participants. Its programs belong to the nonprofit project and to the University of Southern California. Its sole source of financing was a $15,000 grant in early 2008 from the Mozilla Foundation, an organization that promotes the concept of the Internet as a public resource open to everyone.
Nor does Project:Possibility intend to be a commercial venture, Mr. Leung said. “We do not plan to earn revenue through a spread of our programs. In fact,” he said, “we plan to be completely open-source — our programs can be downloaded, modified and used by anyone at no cost — in hopes that similar programs will spread to other universities and around the world with or without our involvement.”
I’m sure this effort is partly due to the hard work of Frank Hecker and it’s great to see Project:Possibility get this exposure.
December 21st, 2008 at 3:40 pm
I have to admit, this is the first time i’ve heard about project:possibility. I’m really, really pleased to see an open-source foundation supporting the development of products for people with disabilities. Traditionally, this type of software is exorbitantly expensive and it really is not accessible to everyone.
I hope that this is a reality, and that everyone can benefit from this. I used to work with people who had severe mental health problems which meant they had alot of problems, from lack of motor control, to literacy issues.
The possibilities are endless for this project, and I sincerely hope that they achieve the goals and they get the funding to develop software that is affordable to all.