As part of an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant, the University of Buffalo library school will train students to make websites accessible to library users with disabilities. This is part of a $995,960 grant to recruit and educate librarians using "hands-on" teaching libraries, a collaborative effort that includes the New York State Library, 13 library systems and programs in library and information science at six colleges in New York state.
p.s. to my friend in Michigan who told me this blog was depressing her - does this help?
Http://www.ub.uni-dortmund.de/listen/inetbib/msg25374.html. describes an interesting experiment in library accessibility. The library web page at the Hamburg, Germany library has become the first library in Germany to use ReadSpeaker technology (from Sweden. See http://www.readspeaker.com) to read pages aloud. You can listen to events, news, their service charges, and their privacy policy. You just open one of those pages, and then click on the loudspeaker icon. A remarkably human-sounding voice starts reading the page.
This is being done to make the web more accessible to people with disabilities, but the technology could lead in lots of other interesting directions.
Posted by: Peter | August 27, 2004 at 10:50 AM