Disabled Surfer IT

INTRODUCTION

Since the computer as we know it was first developed, man has dreamt of systems that can be operated by voice command. Science fiction has portrayed a future where users communicate with computers by voice, and generations have grown up expecting a new dawn whereby we speak and the computer speaks back. The days of communicating naturally with computers by speech, however, are not so far off. Recent technological developments have led to a new way of thinking about how we should interact with computers in general, with the development of the XML specification and the use of XML to develop applications for many types of data. In particular, Voice XML and Speech Application Language Tags (SALT) ( http://www.saltforum.org/ ) are technologies that could revolutionise navigation of computer systems.

Speech technology seems an ideal complement to web appliances. Advances in speech processing have already yielded for users a far more natural sounding voice reading web information. The incorporation of speech recognition can be an important source of user acceptance of any system. Teaching through the use of web pages has provided an alternative way of learning for many people including those who have a disability.

A severely physically disabled student may find it advantageous to study at home, but if the principal teaching medium is the web and the student is unable to independently navigate the pages of the site, then a barrier to learning exists. The provision of services such as audio transcription may depend on the number of students who require the service, and providing 100 students per year with an audio recording of the same course does have advantage in scale compared to a situation where there are only a few students in a course.

This paper reviews the technologies currently available for speech interaction with computers and suggests how the future of web navigation may benefit from these technologies. The paper also discusses the results obtained from evaluation of a voice navigatable website aimed at disabled users.