Technologies for magnifying parts of a video screen are available now but need to become more powerful and flexible, Korn said. For example, a spreadsheet user may want both a particularly important cell as well as the formula bar magnified. "Magnifiers today generally don't magnify multiple regions simultaneously," he said.

Meanwhile, RIAs, which can span the Web and desktop, make the accessibility challenge more complicated, Korn recently wrote in a blog .

That's because along with the three typical components involved in accessibility on the desktop -- an application, an operating system and the particular "assistive technologies" being used -- RIAs also introduce a browser to the equation.

In addition, there is much work to be done in regard to mobile accessibility, Korn wrote: "What assistive technologies exist for mobile are bolt-on, reverse-engineered, and ultimately unsatisfying solutions with limited ability to work with downloaded/3rd party applications - the very place where mobile device capabilities are most rapidly expanding."

AEGIS' focus on open-source components will ensure the broadest possible distribution of its resulting work, and the cheaper it is to develop accessible products, the more likely programmers and companies will do so, according to Korn.