Engineer's Focus: Accessible Technology for All
From: SiliconValley.com - 07/02/2003
By: K. Oanh Ha

IBM software engineer TV Raman, who lost his eyesight to glaucoma in his
adolescence, specializes in developing speech technology that is accessible
to everyone, not just the disabled. His objective is to create standards for
next-generation Web applications - specifically, generating Web content that
can be visual, textual, or spoken, depending on the user's preference.
Projects Raman is working on include "x-forms," a technology designed to ease
Web data collection; such a technology could, for instance, allow Web forms
that currently must be filled out by typing to be completed by voice or by a
message transmitted from a personal digital assistant. Raman's interest in
speech technology was nurtured at Cornell University, when he devised
software that allowed complex mathematical equations on a computer screen to
be read out when the program he originally had to contend with proved
unreliable. The engineer's emacspeak program, which turns a computer desktop
into an audio interface, has been freely distributed online, and will be
included in an forthcoming suite of server software from IBM. Raman and many
others are especially excited about Extensible Markup Language (XML), which
allows Web content to be displayed as text, audio, or graphics, and has the
potential to facilitate greater accessibility for all. One of Raman's
research collaborators is the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which has
taken a vanguard position in the development of Web standards that support
the handicapped. Benetech owner Dan Fruchterman explains, "the goal is
universal design that's integrated and equal: Don't make disabled people use
a different Web structure but make it so they can use it too."  

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