Tech Shout!

Last month, we had reported that IBM had developed a technology that would allow the visually impaired to “see” Internet multimedia content. Now, IBM has released more details on the same saying that it will soon launch a multimedia browser to make audio and video content accessible to people with vision impairments. Codenamed the Accessibility Browser, or A-Browser, this software was created by a blind IBM employee in Japan.

Dr. Chieko Asakawa, the blind IBM researcher who developed the A-Browser said, “Increasingly, I have been facing difficulties where I simply could not access Web content easily. I recently conducted a survey and found that most of the tested Web sites with multimedia content were not accessible.”

“Based on this result and my personal experience, I fear that if we don’t take any action, it will broaden the digital gap between the sighted and the blind. I felt that there should be ways to help narrow the gap concerning multimedia content’s accessibility,” she added.

Using the Accessibility-Browser, a vision-impaired person is able to control media content by using predefined shortcut keys, rather than having to look for the control buttons using a mouse.

It has also been learnt that the A-Browser, is very much like Internet Explorer as it can surf just about any Web page. So, once a user opens a Web page, the browser automatically analyses multimedia objects inside the page, then the browser establishes a connection to each multimedia object. As of now, the browser has adapters for Adobe Flash and Windows Media Player.

As of now, IBM has not yet decided whether the A-Browser will have a worldwide launch of whether it will first be introduced in selected countries first.