Jeffrey Bigham: Bringing the Internet Closer to the Blind

The internet has become indispensable to modern daily life and has in fact become such an integral part of day-to-day human interaction that no one can conceive not having this great, rich tool and resource. However, not everyone is able to maximize the internet's full potential for use in their own lives, limited by physical disabilities – blindness, in particular. This problem is what formed the core of Jeffrey Bigham’s doctoral study at the University of Washington.

How exactly do the blind use the internet? A screen reader is the answer. This software reads the contents of a computer out loud, allowing the blind to navigate the world wide web. However, the technology is rather expensive and less than one percent of all blind people in the world have access to this. Enter Bigham's WebAnywhere, a free self-voicing browser that lets the blind use the internet no matter where they may be. WebAnywhere uses speech from a central server, sending this audio to a user's computer. The initial concern with WebAnywhere was the time it would take for the audio to be sent back to the user, something that Bigham addressed by coming up with a model that is able to predict which parts of a web page users are most likely to check out and is therefore able to fetch corresponding audio ahead of time.

Jeffrey Bigham, now an assistant professor in computer science at the University of Rochester, designed the program for free use on any operating system, without any special software requirements, in order to answer the demand for accessible software for the blind. According to test studies conducted, Bigham's WebAnywhere met with success as blind subjects were able to complete online tasks such as checking email, searching for business phone numbers or looking for public transportation. Bigham is currently working to create a mobile version of WebAnywhere and was the first to receive Microsoft's Accessible Technology Award for Interface Design in 2008.