Web Form Speech Input for Non-Wintel Systems

I support this petition:

For over three years, a proposal to allow microphone audio input in HTML
forms, along with other device input - www.bovik.org/device-upload.html -
has been before the HTML Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium
(w3.org/Markup). This capability would bring great benefits to everyone on
the web, including spoken language instruction, asynchronous audio
conferencing, voicemail, and transcription services. Even though the
proposal was implemented on the WebTV Plus, it has has not been adopted by
any other major browser. So now, those who need to provide such capabilities
on their web sites have found that they must use overly complex, nonstandard
HTML client extensions, and even then are only able to serve customers using
one of the two major browsers on the Microsoft/Intel platform. This state of
affairs completely excludes Macintosh and Unix web users from all those
services requiring input and upload from any device.

      While the current state of Web infrastructure supports the
      submission of text data from client to server... there does not
      yet exist an analogous method for capturing audio data at the
      client and delivering it to the server. Our solution ... limits
      the system's accessibility to users of Internet Explorer under
      Windows.
      -- D. Turner and K. Ross in the Proceedings of the International
      Symposium on Intelligent Media and Distance Education, August 1999

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Matteo Fogli

Received on Thursday, 2 March 2000 13:06:11 UTC