Mozilla Foundation grant allows for employment of NVDA full-time developer

Thanks to the generocity and support of the  Mozilla Foundation  NV Access has been able to hire James Teh as a full-time developer to work on NVDA. The Mozilla Foundation has taken a keen interest in NVDA as one of NVDA's goals is to provide excellent support for Mozilla products, such as Firefox and Thunderbird.

The grant (which provides NV Access with US$80,000 over 2008) allows NV Access to employ James Teh (Jamie) full-time to work on improving and maintaining NVDA, with a major focus on Mozilla products. The grant will be also used to cover overheads for the running of NV Access, which a part from general administration, also includes project promotion and the seeking of further funding.

NV Access and Mozilla worked together to draw up a list of grant goals for NVDA, which both organizations see as the most important things that should be achieved to make the project a success. Although the grant will be reviewed before the end of this year, all the goals listed are to be completed with in a three year timeline.

Jamie will hopefully be starting work in the next month or so, once all the admin has been organized. I for one am very excited to have Jamie join the project on a much more full-time basis, and I know he is also very excited to be able to put all his working time to open-source projects that hopefully can improve the lives of people in the community in some way.

On behalf of NV Access, and the other developers of NVDA I would like to thank the Mozilla Foundation for its support over the last year. Together we can make sure that blind users will always have both a free choice when it comes to access to applications on the Microsoft Windows Operating System, and also a choice to move forward with the rest of the community, to use free and open-source products (such as Firefox and Thunderbird).