by Penny Reeder
Imagine leaning back in your easy chair in front of the tube, wondering what might be playing on Ted Turner’s audio-described classic movie TV channel, picking up your portable phone and dialing a number which connects you to the “www.direct-tv” online web site. There, you browse through the listings for the evening and learn that the classic movie for this evening is your spouse's favorite.
So, using the same phone, you go to the online menu at the web page of your favorite Chinese restaurant, and you place an order for a delectable dinner for two. Then, you go to “www.finewines.com” to see what the daily specials are, make a selection, place your order, and call your wife at her office to tell her to hurry home for your date!
While you wait for the doorbell to ring with delivery-persons from the Chinese restaurant and finewines.com on the other side, you check out the progress of your financial investments at “e- trade.com,” and you visit your child’s elementary school home page, where you learn that his book report is due in three days and that he got an A on his math test yesterday. You order some doggie treats for your faithful pooch, and you check on the contents of your checking account and make a deposit into your savings. You register to vote in your state’s upcoming primary election, and you go to the NLS web page to read “Talking Book Topics.”
Keep imagining now. You have accomplished all this by just dialing your phone and listening to the very pleasant synthesized voice of everypath, a telephone-accessed Internet browser which allows you to access hundreds of informative World Wide Web sites to find exactly the information you seek quickly and efficiently, without even turning on your personal computer. Imagine accessing the World Wide Web with a tool that’s as simple and intuitive as your telephone! All of this may sound too good to be true, but it may be just around the corner!
On Thursday, January 6, 2000, Charlie Crawford and I met with representatives from a telephone-accessed web browser called everypath.
Everypath is a company based in Silicon Valley, Calif., which is developing a telephone interface to the World Wide Web. Unlike other service providers who have promised similar telephone-based interfaces to the Internet, everypath seems to be approaching the mechanics of web access from a couple of interesting perspectives. They are identifying organizations and companies who want to make their online information available to people who may not have the time or the wherewithal to access it with computers. And they are attempting to identify the kinds of information that these sorts of consumers will want to access.
Getting to the Essential Information
Their engineers have developed technology which can identify and isolate the essential information which a visitor might want from a web site, and present that information via a clear and understandable synthesized “Real (computer) Voice,” which a user can access with voice or keypad commands on a standard telephone! Joe Griffin, vice president of corporate development, describes the product which his company can bring to a consumer as a kind of “Reader’s Digest” for every connected site.
“We focus on the tasks that people want to accomplish, and on the information that pertains to those tasks,” he says.
What kinds of information would visually impaired users like to obtain? When representatives from everypath went to visit the Federal Communications Commission to find out exactly what technical specifications might apply to them, the folks at the FCC told them, with a certain degree of enthusiasm, that their product might be a natural fit for the needs of many Americans with disabilities — especially people who are visually impaired. When everypath asked how they could find out what visually impaired people might need, the FCC sent them to Charlie Crawford and the American Council of the Blind!
So, they came to talk to ACB, to find out what kinds of web sites our members might be interested in accessing. They demonstrated their system on an ordinary speaker-phone in the ACB national office’s conference room. In response to a voice command, the web browser connected to an “E-Trading” service, and read the stock market quotations regarding a particular commodity. One of everypath’s chief engineers described an anticipated capability for buying, selling, or getting more detailed information about particular stocks, and he told us how one of their staff members recently purchased an airline ticket from an E-fare site which she had accessed via everypath. Griffin says that the company anticipates establishing a connection with 200 web sites by the end of the year.
Already, everypath is working with an online stock-market and trading site. They have talked to airlines and to department stores, and to telecommunications service providers. They anticipate making their voice-interfaced dial-in service available via cellular phones, pagers, and other portable telecommunications devices, some of which may still reside in the imaginations of their inventors. While the company is working with web content providers now, its services will not be available to the general public until April 2000.
Stay tuned to “The Braille Forum” to find out where this exciting accessible service may lead. We may be at the dawn of the kind of access to information which visually impaired people have only dared to include on their wish lists until now.