AIR Austin, the Accessibility Internet Rally for Austin, is a team-based website design competition organized by MAIN (Metropolitan Austin Interactive Network), Easter Seals serving Central Texas, and Goodwill Industries of Austin.
Since the early 1990s, MAIN and others (prominently Austin FreeNet) have sponsored "Web Raisings," informal one-day events that invite not-for-profit and grass-roots community organizations to bring information about their organizations; agency participants are matched with HTML/Web "gurus" who provide hands-on training and expertise, and typically leave (half-a-day later, real-time) with a MAIN-hosted Web Site, FTP access (logon and password), copies of HTML files for updating, and shareware HTML authoring tools and hands-on experience in their use.
MAIN thanks both AISD and UT/Austin for hosting multiple occurrences of these events. These "Web Raisings" have been VERY successful (20 - 50 organizational participants per event).
In late 1997, Easter Seals and Goodwill Industries in Austin - both affiliates of well-known national charitable organizations providing jobs and healthcare services to people with disabilities - proposed to take the notion of "web-raisings" to the next level with the AIR-Austin event.
Adding to the basic objective of MAIN of putting NPO information on the Web, Easter Seals and Goodwill have come together with MAIN to add compelling new, related objectives - facilitating community information access, broadening personal horizons, and informal community networking.
AIR-Austin was so successful, it grew a parent organization to build on these objectives and replicate this community development program throughout the country. That parent organization is the nonprofit corporation A HREF="http://www.knowbility.org">Knowbility, Inc. Knowbility's mission is to promote barrier- free information technology and to connect people with disabilities to all of the opportunities of the new economy.
The AIR-Austin Web site was built with assistance from The Virtual Volunteering Project
The AIR-Austin Web site is "Bobby Approved" -- meaning our site is fully-accessible to people using assistive technologies to view Web pages. We used Bobby to guide this process.
Corporate Sponsors
Powershift Group
Civic Pride
Applied Materials
Infotec Training Centers
Advising Organizations
For more information about AIR-Austin, call
Sharron Rush at 512/478-2581
or send email srush@knowbility.org.
or visit the
AIR-Austin Web site
http://www.knowbility.org/AIR-Austin