IBM Home Page Reader

Home Page Reader
Home Page Reader 3.0 rendering Wikipedia.
Developer	IBM Special System Needs (SNS)
Final release	3.04 [1] / 2005;21 years ago (2005)
Operating system	Windows 95/98/NT
Platform	Windows
Available in	English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish [2]
Type	Screen Reader
Website	Homepage (Archive.org)

Home Page Reader (Hpr) was a computer program, a self-voicing web browser designed for people who are blind. It was developed by IBM from the work of Chieko Asakawa at IBM Japan.

Hpr was first introduced in 1998 for the Windows 95 Operating System. The major innovation of Hpr was that it directly used the HTML content of the web page to build its model of the content, allowing it to more flexibly handle interactions important for the Web, such as navigating content that scrolled off of the screen, navigating between different frames, and interacting with form fields ^[3] . The common way that screen readers attempted to work at the time was by directly "reading the screen."

The screen reader met World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) HTML 4.01 specifications, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 and User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. ^[4]

In 2006, it was announced on the Hpr mailing list that IBM does not have plans for any further updates of HPR and the software was subsequently withdrawn from sale by IBM in December 2006. ^[5] IBM has given code to be used as a Firefox extension.^{[ citation needed ]}

The program also had a peer-support mailing list. ^{[6] [note 1]}

System requirements

Hardware

Hpr had the following hardware requirements: ^[7]

• 166 MHz processor
• 32 MB RAM Windows 95/98; 64 MB RAM for Windows NT
• 14 MB hard disk space; 42 MB hard disk space for HPR and Netscape Communicator
• SVGA (640 X 480, 256 colors) graphics
• Windows compatible: modem (28.8 KBPS), sound card (16-bit), and CD ROM drive (quad-speed)
• Integrated or separately attached numeric keypad

Software

Hpr had the following software requirements: ^[7]

• Microsoft Windows 95, 98 or NT 4.0
• Internet service provider (ISP) connection
• Netscape Navigator Version 3.01 or higher
• For Home Page Mailer, Microsoft Personal Web Server, Version 4.02 required for Windows 95/98; Peer Web Services, Version 4.0 required for Windows NT
• A mail program set up with preferences, or Microsoft Personal Web Server or Peer Web Services required for mailto: tags

References

Notes

1. Its archives were available at http://www.talklist.com/forms/ibm-hpr%5B%5D

References

1. "Home Page Reader Version 3 : Spectronics - Inclusive Learning Technologies". Archived from the original on July 29, 2010. Retrieved 10 August 2010.
2. "IBM relaunch browser for the blind". evolt.org. Archived from the original on 27 October 2016. Retrieved 10 August 2010.
3. Asakawa, Chieko; Itoh, Takashi (1998). "User interface of a Home Page Reader". Proceedings of the third international ACM conference on Assistive technologies (ASSETS '98). New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 149–156. doi:10.1145/274497.274524. ISBN   1581130201.
4. "IBM Home Page Reader 3.04". IBM. 2007. Archived from the original on 30 December 2006. Retrieved 10 August 2010.
5. faulkner, steve (November 7, 2006). "IBM Home Page Reader is Dead". AOL Ability. Archived from the original on 7 January 2007. Retrieved 10 August 2010.
6. "BLIST: The Comprehensive Index of Blindness-Related Emailing Lists". June 20, 2002. Retrieved 10 August 2010.
7. "IBM Home Page Reader". Archived from the original on 3 February 2013. Retrieved 10 August 2010.

External links

• HomePage reader @ evolt.
• , IBM
• IBM Home Page Reader Keyboard Shortcuts, WebAIM
• IBM Home Page Reader Tutorial, WebAIM