Microsoft has awarded an Innovation Grant to the non-profit organization NV Access, Inc. (and Australian non-profit) to fund advancement of NVDA, a leading open source screen reader for Windows. The grant is targeted to enable support for UI Automation, the next generation accessibility API for Windows. And to enable support for Accessible Rich Internet Applications in Internet Explorer. The timeframe for these advancements is the next seven months.
NV Access post of project: http://www.nvaccess.org/blog/MicrosoftGrant2008-2009Announcement
NV Access: http://www.nvaccess.org/
NVDA Project: http://www.nvda-project.org/