T. V. Raman
Advanced Technology Group
Adobe Systems
November 13, 1996
Abstract
Immediate and timely access to up- to- date information is
likely to prove
critical for the success of both individuals and societies in
the coming cen-tury.
As the flood of information increases, the half- life of up-
to- date in-formation
diminishes correspondingly. Thus, where a weekly news
journal
once sufficed to keep people "well informed", the information
age is char-acterized
by constantly updating sources of information.
Success or failure in this age will ultimately be determined
by the level
of access that one has to the latest and most reliable sources
of information.
Where access to the latest information is a strong advantage,
users deprived
of such information suffer from a correspondingly serious
handicap. The
most visible manifestation of this is in the case of ready
information access
by the visually impaired.
Until now, information interchange has been mediated by a
passive in-termediary
-printed paper. Ideas expressed on paper therefore remain
dead
until perused by a human. Printed paper is also useless to
someone who
cannot see, and until now making information accessible has
been a time-consuming
and expensive process. As a consequence, only those items of
in-formation
that remain relevant for a sustained period of time e. g.,
text books,
could be converted to Braille or recorded on audio tape.
Thus, information with a relatively short half- life, e. g.,
the latest news-papers,
have always remained inaccessible to the blind. Such a
deficiency
could be a serious drawback in the information age, and would
threaten to
further set back an already disadvantaged group.
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The very enabler of the information revolution, computing
technology,
also promises to provide a solution in no uncertain manner. In
the world of
electronic documents, ideas are no longer interchanged via a
passive inter-mediary.
Instead, information interchange is mediated by an agent
capable
of computing on the information.
The social impact of this change is enormous. The computer as
the inter-mediary
in information exchange can enable smart documents that
capture
information and present it:
where the user wants,
when the user wants, and
the way the user wants!
As in client- server computing, the information provider can
play the role of
server and make information available on the network; the user
as the client
can access this information in a manner best suited to the
individual's needs
and abilities.
Where availability of the latest information online to the
average user
is a convenience, to users with special needs these online
sources represent
information to which timely access would be otherwise
impossible. Such
immediate availability of information will have a profound
impact on the
way we live, work, profit, learn, govern, and communicate.
Ultimately this
evolution will ensure that the oncoming flood of information
raises all boats.
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1 Introduction
Once upon a time, ideas were exchanged by word of mouth and
passed down ver-bally
through the generations. In this era, information had the
ephemeral quality
of existing only in the minds of people. The written word
enabled the evolution
of mechanisms to capture and pass down accumulated knowledge;
the key feature
of this phase was the ability to reliably record and recall
information.
In the era where documents were prepared by qualified scribes,
carefully pre-pared
written scrolls represented the means by which information was
stored for
posterity. Paper (or papyrus) represented both the repository
of information, as
well as the vehicle used to disseminate information. In this
phase of the infor-mation
revolution, the written document was available but to a few;
the number
of people capable of publishing information were even fewer.
This state of af-fairs
went through another dramatic change with Gutenberg's
mainstreaming of
the printing press; spreading information via the written word
suddenly became
a lot easier, and as a consequence, printed documents became a
more generally
available means for communicating ideas.
The concomitant increase in the availability of written
information was enor-mous.
In the age of the scribe, the effort involved in publishing
meant that only
documents that were perceived as being timeless could be
preserved as hand-written
scrolls. With the advent of the printing press, the set of
written documents
grew to encompass information that would otherwise not have
been represented
by the written word. Notice that as publishing becomes easier,
the life span of
information that people can afford to publish falls
correspondingly.
As the next phase in this revolution, electronic information
promises to em-power
everyone to publish. The corresponding increase in the
availability of infor-mation
is enormous. As this tide of information rises, the life span
of any single
item of information falls steadily; where once a written
scroll was perceived as
representing timeless content, a well- formatted printed
advertisement often repre-sents
no more than a piece of worthless junk mail in the era of
desktop publishing.
The flood of information is not the only feature of the
current phase of the
information revolution. Even though most information is still
communicated by
means of printed documents, the paper on which the information
is printed is no
longer the sole repository of the information. In the age of
electronic information,
printed paper merely represents one of the several vehicles
used to disseminate in-formation.
The information itself resides in an electronic form that is
in principle
display independent.
This has a profound impact on how we produce, archive,
retrieve and consume
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information. Information is no longer merely stored on paper
for consumption by
future generations; instead, electronic communication provides
the means to cap-ture
information in a computable form. When this information
exchange is me-diated
by an intelligent intermediary -the computer- it opens up the
possibility
of producing and consuming information in a multiplicity of
formats.
2 Information Is Not Just For Viewing!
The availability of information in a computable formas opposed
to a purely visual
representation means that electronic information can be more
than just viewed on
a flat two- dimensional display. Where information is only
available in its visual
form, e. g., as printed paper, it requires an intelligent
human in order to make use
of the ideas represented by the pattern of black and white
dots appearing on the
page. Computing technology can offset some of these
difficulties; for instance, the
visual image of the page can be digitized to produce an array
of black and white
dots, and Optical Character Recognition can be applied to
discern the characters
and words from this pattern of dots. However, the underlying
structure of the
information, as well as its meaning and purpose remain
elusive.
Electronic documents draw their true strength from the fact
that today most
documents originate digitally. This means that documents are
authored on a com-puter;
as a consequence, the computer has more than the pattern of
black and
white dots to work with -computers can now get their hands at
the true informa-tion
that gives rise to the final form representation that we are
used to seeing as
black marks on white paper.
With access to such rich structural information, computers can
present the
information based on a user's needs and abilities. Thus, one
can produce high-quality
typeset output suitable for a high- end image- setter, or
speak the informa-tion
to afunctionally blind user.
Notice the use of the term functionally blind user in the
previous paragraph.
A blind user is characterized by an inability to work with
printed information.
This deficiency can be viewed as a mismatch between the
demands placed on an
individual by her environment and the means and abilities the
individual possesses
to meet these demands. Taking this view, a person using a
telephone to access
electronic mail and an automobile driver unable to look at a
computer monitor 1
are both (equally) functionally blind with respect to being
able to read a printed
1 Automobile drivers should be looking at the road!
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document.
Thus, the technology of audio documents which on the surface
appears to be
of relevance only to blind users is in fact useful to a far
larger set of people. This is
in fact not a one- off situation of technology designed for
users with special needs
impacting a far larger population -how many of us remember
that the plain old
telephone was a bi- product of attempts at developing a
hearing aid!
Structurally rich electronic documents can be presented in
several different
media, and high- quality visual or aural output are just a few
examples.
3 Multiple Views Of Electronic Information
Information has been traditionally displayed to a two-
dimensional visual tablet.
Visual formatting -the process by which information is
visually laid out on the
two- dimensional display in a manner that facilitates easy
browsing based on the
underlying information structure- has evolved over the
centuries to its current
sophistication. Open your favorite daily newspaper and observe
the layout of the
various news items in a manner designed to allow the eye to
quickly spot topics
of interest and browse them selectively.
As information technology evolves, it becomes necessary to
perform simi-lar
high- quality formatting for other displays including computer
monitors and
speech output devices to name a few. Formatting information
for the interactive
visual display represented by the computer monitor is still in
a state of flux. Once,
it was thought that all that would be required would be to
produce a high- fidelity
online representation of the visual layout produced on paper.
However, a computer
monitor is hard to roll up and throw across your living room
(unlike your favorite
newspaper). In addition, the interactive nature of computer
displays means that
many of the assumptions made when laying out information to
the static medium
of printed paper need to be reconsidered.
The field of audio formatting -producing renderings of
information opti-mized
for an auditory display- is still in its infancy. The notion
of audio format-ting
was first introduced in [Ram94] -visit A S T E R (Audio System
For Technical
Readings) on the WWW 2 for an interactive demonstration. A S T
E R gaverise to
many insights into the issues that come up in rendering
information to an auditory
display. Whereas visual interaction is characterized by a
passive visual display
that is actively perused by a human, auditory output scrolls
linearly past a pas-2
URLhttp:// www. cs. cornell. edu/ home/ raman
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sive listener. This reversal of the active- passive
relationship in auditory interfaces
leads to many interesting questions concerning audio browsing
-see the relevant
publications found on the WWW 3 . The insight gained from
developing and us-ing
A S T E R has been applied in designing a fluent spoken
interface to the desktop
-see [Ram96] for a description of the audio desktop provided
by Emacspeak 4 .
4 Conclusion
Electronic communication in the world of networked computing,
where struc-turally
rich documents are stored and interchanged via an intelligent
intermediary
enables smart documents. Smart documents can be reused,
searched and displayed
to multiple media based on the user's requirements.
Interactive interfaces based
on this paradigm are in their nascent stage and present
enormous potential. As
a new dimension in human computer interaction, speech and
audio promises to
enrich our overall information experience in the coming
century. The benefits
of this information revolution are not restricted to the
technologically advanced
world; in fact their impact and potential benefit is likely to
be far greater in parts
of the world where lack of resources and a concomitant
negative social attitude
has meant that a large set of disabled individuals have long
been placed at a socio-economic
disadvantage.
References
[Gib96] Wayte Gibbs. Envisioning speech. Scientific American,
September
1996.
[Hay96] Brian Hayes. Speaking of mathematics. American
Scientist, 84( 2),
March- April 1996.
[Ram94] T. V. Raman. Audio System for Technical Readings.
PhD thesis,
Cornell University, Ithaca NY., May 1994.
URLhttp:// www. cs. cornell. edu/ home/ raman Audio formatted
thesis
produced by A S T E R, is available from Recording for the
Blind (RFB
order number FB190).
3 URLhttp:// www. cs. cornell. edu/ home/ raman/
publications
4 URLhttp:// www. cs. cornell. edu/ home/ raman/
emacspeak
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[Ram96] T. ~ V. Raman. Emacspeak -a speech interface.
Proceedings of CHI96,
April 1996.
[RG94] T. V. Raman and David Gries. Documents mean more than
just paper!
Proceedings of the 2nd. International Workshop on the
Principles of
Document Processing, 1994.
[Van94] Greg C. Vanderheiden. Building disability access
directly into
next- generation information and transaction systems. Keynote
Speech,
As-sociation
Of Computing Machinery (ACM) -Tokyo, Japan, March 1994.
URLgopher:// trace. wisc. edu// 00/ ftp/ PUB/ TEXT/ TRACEPAP/
ACMJAPAN. TXT
Trace R& D Center, University Of Wisconsin
(Madison).
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