[nfbwatlk] Google funds new research to help blind web surfers, PhysOrg.com, March 30, 2010

Mike Freeman k7uij at panix.com
Fri Apr 2 03:43:44 UTC 2010


I hate to be a skeptic but it sounds to me like just another case of someone 
aiming to do good and people purporting to do research doing very well.

For starters, I didn't see anything about contacting consumer organizations 
of the blind either here or in the UK (but I didn't read the whole article). 
How can valid research be done without at least speaking with 
representatives of organizations of the blind and, more especially, their 
tech gurus such as Curtis Chong?

Next, note that they studied what people *looked* at to determine what 
should be spoken. Any web page that did that in this country would go broke 
as sighted folks try their damndest to filter out spam whereas web 
developers and those who pay for the pages desperately want people to look 
at the glitz that pays for it all. Moreover, what (and in what order) one 
wishes to hear may well be different from that which one sees. In microcosm, 
this is somewhat the same problem we face in trying to develop a 
blind-drivable car or, for that matter, an accessible cable box. If we 
really were presented with all those updating tickers, we'd never hear 
anything else!

In other words, the problem isn't nearly as simple as either we or the 
researchers who are making money out of all this imagine. And may this all 
not ultimately come down to a conflict in aims between those of us who just 
want one particular factoid or bit of information (you'd be surprised how 
long it takes sometimes just to find a phone number) and those who want to 
spam us to death?

Sorry but I'm an inveterate skeptic on this sort of funny-business.

Apologies to Mary Ellen. (grin)

Mike

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Nightingale, Noel" <Noel.Nightingale at ed.gov>
To: <NFBWATLK at NFBNET.ORG>
Sent: Thursday, April 01, 2010 2:44 PM
Subject: [nfbwatlk] Google funds new research to help blind web surfers, 
PhysOrg.com, March 30, 2010




Link:
http://www.physorg.com/news189181904.html

Text:
Google funds new research to help blind web surfers
March 30, 2010

(PhysOrg.com) -- New research by University of Manchester scientists that 
could help blind people find their way around the World Wide Web has been 
given a boost with a £50,000 grant from Google.

Drs Andy Brown, Caroline Jay and Simon Harper who are based at the 
University's School of Computer 
Science<http://www.physorg.com/tags/computer+science/>, have already 
developed a prototype screen reader that has been successfully tested on 
blind web surfers in an independent evaluation.

The team used specialist eye tracking techniques to find out how sighted 
people interact with complex Web pages so they could translate the pages 
into audio.

Now they are working with Google<http://www.physorg.com/tags/google/> to 
make their technology, which is not yet suitable for general use, freely 
available to people with visual impairments.

They aim to provide a way of modifying Web pages so blind people can easily 
access them without having to wait for commercial screen reading 
technology - which reads web pages<http://www.physorg.com/tags/web+pages/> 
aloud - to catch up with the latest research developments.

Dr Jay said: "The growth of Web 2.0 technologies is fundamentally changing 
the way that people interact with the Web.

"A short time ago, navigating the Web was simply a matter of clicking links, 
moving from one static page to another.

"Now it's possible to spend a considerable amount of time interacting with a 
single page through its "dynamic micro content" that updates independently, 
without changing the URL."

She added: "Unfortunately, blind 
people<http://www.physorg.com/tags/blind+people/> are excluded from many of 
these exciting developments and our research aims to change all that.

"They can have real problems accessing web applications - such as calendars, 
tickers and suggestion lists - found on travel, entertainment and social 
networking sites.

"This is because the screen reading technology which converts the visual 
page to audio doesn't say when a web page changes, making much of Web 2.0 is 
inaccessible to people with visual impairments."

More information: The detailed technical reports describing background, 
implementation and all the underlying research for the SASWAT project are 
available in the team's open-access data repository: 
http://hcw-prints.cs.man.ac.uk/view/subjects/saswat.html

Provided by University of Manchester 
(news<http://www.physorg.com/partners/university-of-manchester/> : 
web<http://www.manchester.ac.uk/>)

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