Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Web surfing as a listening activity

I think QTSaver can be great for blind and visually Impaired users, since it retrieves less text and the text is more to the point than in other alternatives.

In order to know more about this subject I took QT for a ride and got an article by Carmen Mardiros who says that a fairly large percent of Internet surfers are visually impaired.

  • May be color blind
  • May be completely blind or partially sighted
  • May suffer from disabilities preventing them from reading or comprehending text
    properly (for example dyslexia)
  • May not be able to read small text

Over the past few years, some browsers have been developed especially for people
with disabilities. These include products with optical character recognition,
screen magnifier, screen readers, voice recognition, speech synthesisers, etc.


Then I got this:

For tens of millions of people with disabilities, speech-recognition technology
is more than a new toy or even a productivity tool-it's a way to profoundly
change their lives…Dyslexics, for example, can have computers read to them so
they don't have to ask others for help.

And this:

The whole point about the web is that it is about fast and easy access to
information. However, this is not necessarily the case for visually impaired
users. As many of you know, the web can actually be more time consuming,
cumbersome, and frustrating than other, more traditional interfaces, such as the
telephone.

1 comment:

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