Greetings,

(written to you from the 45th floor of the Marriott hotel, 
overlooking Times Square)

Earlier this evening Pat Sueltz, Marney Beard, Marc Mulcahy, 
Pierce Crowell, a number of other Sun folks from NY and their 
guests, and Thomas Friehoff of BAUM attended the 2002 Helen Keller 
Achievement Awards at the New York Marriott Marquis hotel in 
Manhattan.  

At this black tie affair, Pat and Peter received the award on 
behalf of Sun Microsystems and the GNOME community for the GNOME 
Accessibility framework in the GNOME 2.0 platform.  The other 
honorees this year were Maurice Greenberg of American International
Group for corporate philanthropy, Kathleen Barclay of GM
for employment opportunity, and Ronnie Milsap who received the 
Personal Achievement award.

In her acceptance speech remarks, Pat specifically recognized the 
work of the GNOME community, including (by name) Bill Haneman of
Sun, Owen Taylor, Michael Meeks, and Havoc Pennington for their 
contributions, and also recognizing the corporate contributions 
of Red Hat and Ximian.  Pat underscored the importance of open, 
collaborative accessibility solutions - that support for people with 
disabilities in GNOME, [GNU/Linux] and UNIX is not the domain of 
any single company, but is now in the hands of the larger 
community, who can find and fix problems that may arise 
without being beholden to Sun or anyone else.  Pat then 
highlighted the contributions of the Sun Beijing team to 
Mozilla accessibility, and the Sun Hamburg team OpenOffice
accessibility.  Finally, Pat noted the contributions that Bill 
and Peter have made as the architects of GNOME accessibility, 
and she turned the stage over to Peter.

In his remarks, Peter (that's me, your humble author) spoke 
briefly about the philosophy of the GNOME Accessibility 
architecture - defining a clear accessibility contract and 
then implementing that in the core building blocks
of applications and the desktop.  He further highlighted the GNOME 
On-screen Keyboard which the University of Toronto 
Adaptive Technology Resource Center is contributing to the 
community, and the Gnopernicus screen reader and screen
magnifier which BAUM Retec A.G. is contributing to the community.
Finally, Peter quoted Helen Keller herself, who said "Alone we can 
do so little; together we can do so much", and again underscored 
that GNOME Accessibility is a community effort - that with this 
work, the community is delivering an alternative to the dominant 
traditional desktop that is compelling, accessible, and also 
dramatically more affordable.


It was a wonderful evening, and a great affirmation of all of our work.  

Sun's press release about the event can be found at:

  http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2002-09/sunflash.20020924.1.html

The AFB press release about the event can be found at:

  http://www.afb.org/info_document_view.asp?DocumentID=1806 

Regards,

Peter