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http://www.abcnews.com/sections/tech/cnet/cnet_blindusers981021.html

Efforts aimed at blind Net users

Paul Festa
CNET NEWS.COM
As the nation observes National Disabilities Month, two firms and a
standards organization are honing in on the needs of visually impaired users.

IBM today announced the English version of Home Page Reader, its browser
for the visually impaired. The product, already available in Japanese, will
be sold and packaged with Netscape Communications' Navigator browser.

The product advances beyond traditional screen readers by providing
navigation tools for links and other HTML elements such as forms and
tables. The browser reads standard text in a male voice and links in a
female voice. It also provides searching capabilities for links, helping
users negotiate sites with dozens or hundreds of links per page.

IBM is not the first firm to provide a browser for the blind. Productivity
Works debuted its voice-based browser in 1996. pwWebSpeak is a stand-alone
browser, rather than an add-on.

Productivity Works is gearing up for the launch of another voice-based
browsing product, which will utilize the telephone.

The firm's pwTelephone is geared not only to the visually impaired, but
also to people without access to Internet-ready PCs. The software may also
prove useful to firms that want to provide information, such as schedules
or price lists, both by phone and over the Web and from a single source.

Another Web-telephone product is General Magic's Web-On-Call.

Interest in phone-based Web access systems is reflected in activity at the
World Wide Web Consortium, the standards body whose recommendations are
widely respected and recognized among Web developers internationally. The
W3C this month held a workshop to discuss phone-based Web access.

The workshop will likely result in a W3C working group for voice browsers,
according to Productivity Works cofounder and senior vice president Mark
Hakkinen, who attended the workshop.

"In the world today, far more people have access to a telephone than have
access to a computer with an Internet connection," the W3C noted in a call
for participation. "Voice browsers offer the promise of allowing people to
access the Web from any telephone, vastly increasing the number of people
who can use Web sites."

The W3C has an arm devoted specifically to issues regarding Web users with
disabilities, the Web Accessibility Initiative. The initiative has worked
to make both Web languages and Web developers more friendly to visually
impaired users, pushing for more descriptive alternative text for images
and tables, for instance, and for standards that make tables and columns
readable by voice browsers.

The English version of IBM's product will be available in January.
PwTelephone will be available next week.