Keith Howell writes:
>However, if you could network
>consumer goods then various exciting possibilities arise.
>
>Question 1: What kind of clever things would you wish for?

        I must explain so this answer will not sound as dumb as it
might otherwise sound.  People who are either totally blind or who do
not have enough vision to read a screen or any other visual display
are truly having problems these days in finding home appliances that
they can honestly use because the control technology which is popular
right now is so hand-eye oriented.  It is either some kind of GUI or
GUI-like loop in which a person has to point and shoot at some
particular spot on the screen, or it is some round-robin menu system
that is circular with no standard way of starting at some known
point.  The joke that has been floating around on the Internet about
the toaster that uses Windows CE and has several megs of RAM is only
funny because it is so close to the truth.

        People who are blind span every cultural, ethnic, and
intellectual range.  They "watch" television and movies by listening
to the sound.  They use CD players, and any and everything else you
can imagine that is not purely visual in nature.

        For example, we just bought a nice new VCR with hi fi sound, a
perpetual calendar that even has the daylight savings time rules in it
as well as second audio channel, VCR+, and menus in English and at
least one or two other languages.  This was a relatively inexpensive
piece of equipment and actually cost about half and does about 10
times more than the first VCR we ever owned.  The only thing I can't
do with any of those modern features is use them.:-( because the only
way to read the output is by eye, on screen.If there was just one
electronic or optical output channel which was machine-readable, then
$40 or $50 worth of parts could make all the difference in the world.

        Sure, there are the occasional models of VCR that have voice
output circuitry in them.  Zenith presently makes one, but this is not
a system.  When they quit making this model, we will be back to
business as usual.  Rather than putting voice synthesizers that most
people don't need in to everything, I would like to see some sort of
open standard that simply dumps display data to some optical port and
the end user must buy, build, or write an interface program that does
what he or she needs.  This is the kind of functionality I long for.


Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK
OSU Center for Computing and Information Services Data Communications Group