Speak to Your Browser 
By Lincoln D. Stein
From Webtechniques - March, 2000 - page 14

Browsing the Web is an intensely visual experience. Static images and
animations create the mood and meaning of a Web site; font size, color and
shape clue us in to nuances of meaning; icons guide us through the
complexities of site navigation.  

But what if you wanted to browse the Web with your eyes closed? It's not an
absurd idea. There are many times each day when our eyes are busy doing
something else - like driving a car or watching the kids - but our ears are
free. With everything from stock quotes to the daily weather to our own
appointment calendars going up on the Web, wouldn't it be great if we could
control the browser via voice commands and have Web pages read back to us a
paragraph at a time? We could at last be free of the tyranny of the monitor,
mouse, and keyboard. Instead of lugging a laptop around, we could communicate
with the Web using that elegant and ubiquitous appliance, the cell phone.  

Of course, there's also an entire population of individuals who have no
choice but to browse the Web with their ears. The blind and visually
impaired, to whom audio-enabled and braille-enabled terminals were a godsend
during the text-only terminal days of the 70s and early 80s, have been left
dangling in the wind by the visually intensive user interfaces of the 90s.
Applications that "speak" the contents of the computer screen work fine on
the amber screens of yesteryear, but fall down badly when trying to render
today's graphics-intensive Web pages into auditory information.  

New software and software standards now in development promise to make it
possible to browse the Web by ear and voice, allowing the sighted to surf the
Web by phone, in the car, or on the street, and granting the visually
impaired the ability to access the Web, period. In this column I'll discuss
what's new and noteworthy in the field of the audible Web.  

For the entire article:
http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/2000/03/webm/