by Charles H. Crawford
With all that we have heard about the information superhighway, could it be that there is something even bigger coming? With e-mail just a few mouse clicks away and the world wide web bubbling over the telephone wires, what else is there for the keyboard-weary consumer to do? Ta-da! It’s called convergence and it will change the world of information delivery within the next 10 years.
How often do you consider all that electronic clutter in your house — you know, TVs, cassette players, CD changers, portable phones, VCRs, or a DVD system, modems, computers...? Well, remember those old consoles where the radio and the record player and the TV were all in one? Here it comes! The Internet will be streaming information right to your set-top box where it will split off into all kinds of applications.
No, I haven’t gone off my rocker; how does the following sound to you? Imagine a box on top of your television. The box will get all the information from the Internet in what is called broad band. The information can then be split up between your television for movies and entertainment, a special radio that will play Internet radio streams like ACB-Radio, a telephone hook-up to allow you to make calls anywhere in the world for almost nothing and even links to appliances — so you can turn the heat on before coming home or get that dinner started. This latter scenario will probably come about because that box sitting atop your TV can become a transmitter of information and instructions to multiple receivers and appliances in your house.
But wait! What about accessibility and how to use the darn things?
Well, this is where ACB must get more involved with all of this stuff. Almost everything I have mentioned above is already in existence, but almost everything I have mentioned relies upon visual interactions. We’ve got good people like Brian Charlson, Debbie Cook, Julie Carroll and others trying to keep up with all of this, but the challenges are great and we will need to be calling on other members to develop expertise and get in the mix of it all.
If we don’t want to have to rely on our seven-year-old friends and neighbors to hook us up to our phones, radios, or kitchen stoves, we all need to pay attention to the burgeoning technologies that are exploding all around us, and begin insisting on the kinds of non-visual access which will be crucial to our independence and quality of life.