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A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words
Aired February 15 and 16, 1997
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This is Internet On The Air. I'm Joan Silvi. Access to the Internet for
the visually impaired. Details in a moment.
Funding Credit: Internet On The Air is a production of the University of Michigan
School of Information and Michigan radio, made possible by a grant from the W.K. Kellogg
Foundation.
Graphics can make a Web site visually appealing. But has it gone too far? More and more,
graphics are dominating the Web page. But are we missing the forest for the trees? For the
visually impaired, accessing the Internet has become increasingly difficult with the
explosion of graphics-oriented Web pages. Since information is frequently lost in the
translation of graphics to speech, assistive technology browsers never seem to capture the
full information.
But now, there may be help. PW WebSpeak, created by Productivity Works, is designed
specifically for the visually impaired. It's a browser that reads and voice synthesizes
all the contents instead of displaying the text on the screen. The user can navigate based
on the paragraphs, headers and links instead of relying on the formatted page that appears
on the screen.
Navigation control is possible through a variety of ways. In addition to relying on
traditional keyboard or mouse navigation, paraplegic and visually impaired users can move
around the Web sites through speech recognition, special pointers or switches controlled
by puffing into a control mechanism, none of which require the use of hands.
And this new technology is not limited to the visually impaired. The voice navigation
control offers the opportunity to free all users to move away from the computer while
still accessing the Internet.
To learn more about Web access for the visually impaired, you can access our Web site at
www.iota.org. I'm Joan Silvi for Internet On The Air.
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Last Updated January 26, 2000
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