Petition: Web Form Speech Input for Non-Wintel Systems

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.

Michele Bonera
Linux User Group Brescia (Italy)

Received on Tuesday, 29 February 2000 09:15:06 UTC