AUSTIN, TX, July 6 Easter Seals, Goodwill Industries, and Metropolitan Austin Interactive Network (MAIN) announced today that they will produce a website building competition later this year, in cooperation with Applied Materials and its annual business/charity event "Charitech," to promote the development of websites that are accessible to people with disabilities. The event, called the Accessibility Internet Rally for Austin or AIR-Austin is believed to be the first of its kind in the nation. The objective is to highlight how the Internet, and in particular websites, can be designed to be more accessible to people with disabilities, ranging from sight to mobility. Complete information about AIR-Austin and how to enter can be found on the AIR-Austin website at http://www.knowbility.org/AIR-Austin/.
"Estimates are that 1 in 5 of us will encounter some form of disability during our lifetimes," said Steve Guengerich, one of the volunteer organizers of AIR-Austin. "The goal of AIR-Austin is to show how the Internet clearly one of the most important forces in distributing knowledge and creating value in the coming years can be made more accessible to the 20% of our population with disabilities."
Event organizers will match non-profit organizations desiring a new or enhanced website with participating website developers for the friendly competition. Awards will go to the teams developing the most accessible websites, based on judging by a panel of celebrity and expert Internet and web personalities. Teams will be composed of one or more representatives of a greater Austin non-profit organization, along with a group of Internet/web developers. The non-profits and web developers will be paired immediately prior to the competition through a non-partisan selection process to ensure that websites are not pre-assembled.
"One of the enduring benefits to all non-profit organizations that participate in AIR-Austin is that they will get a professionally developed or enhanced website out of the competition that should be an important part of their communications with the community," said Sue Soy, a founding member of MAIN. "Thus, we encourage non-profits to enter AIR-Austin and join in making Austin one of the most accessible cities on the Internet."
Winners of the competition will receive their awards in a special segment of the program at the Charitech event, September 15, at the Austin Convention Center. Web developers wanting to participate may form a team either through their company or through free-lance associations with other developers. Web professionals, aspiring web developers, and in-house webmasters are encouraged to register a team. The registration fee for web development teams and non-profits that participate is $50. The event will be limited to 20 teams.
The AIR-Austin format is a 3-day process, hence the "rally" in the event's name. Day 1, September 10, will be an evening reception for non-profits and web developers where they will meet one another and find out their pairings. Day 2, September 11, will be a day of review, assessment, and design during which the non-profits and the web developers will review the information available and the mission and clientele of the non-profit. Day 3, September 12, will be the 12-hour web development itself.
Infotec Training Centers will be the host location for the actual website development, providing state of the art hardware and software, as well as Internet connections for developing the websites. Infotec training professionals, along with experts recruited by MAIN, will also provide orientation and training classes for participants at no additional charge -- prior to the event.
In addition to Infotec Training Centers, other early corporate sponsors of the event include Powershift Group, Civic Pride and Applied Materials. Further, a number of organizations have assisted in an advisory role for the event, including Citysearch, IBM, AMD, The Delphi Group, Inc., the City of Austin, Impact Online, Austin Free-Net, GTT Communications, PSW Technologies, Tivoli Systems and Sterling Information Group.
About the Event Organizers Goodwill Industries of Central Texas provides job-related services for people with barriers to employment. MAIN is a non-profit, all volunteer, organization bringing community information to the Greater Metropolitan Austin area electronically. Easter Seals Serving Central Texas provides early childhood intervention services to at-risk children and their families, medical rehabilitation to children and adults, and workforce development services to adults with disabilities.
For more information about how to participate, either as a web developer
or as a non-profit organization seeking to have a website developed or
enhanced, please call Sharron Rush 512/478-4596 (email: srush@knowbility.org)
or visit the MAIN website at www.main.org.
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