Programming Contests: Here's A Good One

As I've said before, it is a full-time job these days keeping up with programming contests. In many cases, these contests are self-serving, at least for the sponsor. In other cases, they're worthwhile and beneficial. I'd classify IBM's just announced Accessibility ODF Coding Challenge as the latter.

The goal of the competition is to prepare computer science students to develop or adapt computer programs for people with disabilities, the maturing population, and non-native language speakers, so that they can more easily access, navigate, and use the Web and electronic office documents.

Interestingly, to qualify, contest entries must be based on the OpenDocument Format (ODF). While not having anything necessarily to do with accessibility, knowledge of ODF will be an important part of a programmer's toolkit over the coming years, since (according to Gartner) ODF will be required by 50 percent of governments and 20 percent of commercial organizations by 2010.

But back to assistive technology and the competition at hand: According to the World Health Organization, between 750 million and 1 billion of the world's 6 billion people have a speech, vision, mobility, hearing or cognitive disability. Addressing the computing needs of these individuals is unquestionably important.

"This contest brings together three critical ideas that have significant importance in the computer industry today: open standards, open source, and accessibility," said Bob Sutor, IBM Vice President, Standards and Open Source. "We hope that these efforts spark significant uptake in how we make our information and applications available to as many people as possible."

Prizes include everything from laptops and iPods, to t-shirts and a trip to Los Angeles (that's a prize?). Okay, the LA trip is actually to the or the 22nd Annual International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference, which just happens to be in LA.

Among other requirements, competitors need to:

• Create an extensible accessibility validation tool for word processing documents created in ODF format (.odt format). The tool you create should parse documents and report output that validates accessibility characteristics against the guidelines.
• Submit a short paragraph or two that identifies an ODF accessibility issue and explains how you would use technology to address the issue. If approved by the IBM panel of judges, you'll have the opportunity to create the code to support the solution proposed in your abstract.

The clock has already started ticking, so if you're a college student and want to make a difference, this contest is worth checking out.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 09:52 AM  Permalink