BBC NEWS | Technology | IBM helps blind 'see' web
video
BBC NEWS
IBM helps blind 'see' web video
By Geoff Adams-Spink
Age & disability correspondent, BBC News website
Technology giant, IBM, is soon to launch a multimedia
browser to make audio and video content accessible to
people with vision impairments.
Codenamed the Accessibility Browser - or A-Browser -
the software was created by a blind employee in Japan.
The A-Browser will give blind and partially-sighted
people the same control over multimedia content that
sighted people have using a mouse.
IBM says it will be available later this year and
hopes it will be free.
The A-Browser is the creation of Dr Chieko Asakawa, a
blind employee at IBM's research laboratory in Tokyo.
Dr Asakawa was becoming increasingly frustrated by the
amount of web content that she was unable to access.
For the time being, she and her team are concentrating
on content that is compatible with Real Player and
Windows Media Player.
Cross-talk
Screen readers and self-talking browsers are not able
to deal with video and animation, some of which starts
playing as soon as a page is loaded.
This often interferes with the synthesised speech
output from the screen-reader software.
Using the A-Browser, a vision-impaired person can
control media content by using predefined shortcut
keys, rather than having to look for the control
buttons
using a mouse.
The browser also allows video to be slowed down,
speeded up and can accommodate an additional audio
description or narration track that is often included
to make films and television programmes more
comprehensible to blind people.
The volume controls also allow the user to adjust the
sound of various sources independently - for example
the main audio track, an audio description track
and output from a screen reader.
"We're beginning to look at accessibility as a very
important business area," said Frances West, director
of IBM's Human Ability and Accessibility Centre.
"This is not just from a social responsibility
standpoint, but with ageing baby-boomers we think that
such technology could really benefit the population
in general because all of us will be on this ageing
journey."
The company plans to "open source" its new
accessibility software in order to make it available
to the largest possible number of people.
It is estimated that there are more than 160m blind
and partially-sighted people around the world who
could benefit from such a development.
IBM has not yet decided whether the A-Browser will
have a worldwide launch or whether it will be
introduced in selected countries first.
Story from BBC NEWS:
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