HPR supports IBM's software text-to-speech, SAPI-compliant engine, IBM ViaVoice OutLoud. While HPR speaks web pages to a blind user, sighted users can see the Netscape rendering of the same web page the blind user is reading to provide sighted assistance, if needed. Because Home Page Reader communicates with Netscape Navigator to get web information (HTML source), HPR reads tables, frames, forms, and images on graphical web pages logically, as they should be read.
IBM Home Page Reader offers a number of features that enable it to provide better access for blind users to the World Wide Web:
VIAVOICE TEXT TO SPEECH SERIES
English, IBM Independence Series product that offers blind users better access to the World Wide Web. In 1998, the IBM Special Needs Systems organization in Austin, Texas, worked with IBM Japan to develop Home Page Reader as a U.S. In October, 1997, the IBM Japan Entry Systems Business Unit (ESBU) announced IBM Home Page Reader as a Japanese consumer product for blind user access to the web. To address these problems, the research lab decided to develop a talking web browser solution for Japan that analyzed HTML tags rather than simply reading the screen. However, this solution read only the text information displayed on the screen it was unable to read and navigate tables, forms, long web pages, and frames. Since the IBM Screen Reader/2 product had been translated into Japanese, the IBM Tokoyo Research lab first tried to create a prototype system using SRD/2 to read Netscape Navigator web pages. When Japanese blind users did try to access the web in the DOS environment, the screen reading and navigation of hypertext links and two-dimensional information was difficult and incorrect (Asakawa & Itoh, 1997). With computer users able to get information easily and quickly from all over the world using the Internet and blind users unable to access the web easily, the information gap between sighted and blind users was becoming wider. In 1996, blind people in Japan had only two sources of published information: Braille books and cassette tapes. This paper discusses how IBM Home Page Reader, a new web browser solution for blind users, implements some of these guidelines in its approach to address World Wide Web accessibility problems for blind users. These prioritized guidelines offer recommendations for browser implementations which significantly improve access to WWW documents. In the last year, the World Wide Web Consortium, as part of its Web Accessibility Initiative, has authored accessibility guidelines for user agents, which include screen readers and screen magnifiers working with web browsers as well as independent web browsers (Gunderson & Jacobs, 1998). Web browser solutions for people who are blind suffer from a growing list of problems including the inability to easily obtain page layout information, difficulty navigating the grammatical and structural elements of a web page, synthesizer inaccuracies, the inability to accurately read tabular information, and limited document search capabilities (Vanderheiden, Chisholm, & Ewers, 1996). "If you’ve ever been using a website and wished it had a voice input, now you can add one yourself.IBM Home Page Reader: The Voice of the World Wide WebĬatherine Laws and Chieko and Special Needs Systems You can also use Voice In to practice your pronunciation in all these languages.
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