ideological speed bumps

[Hugh Sasse]

One would have hoped that 19 years after the Americans with
Disabilities Act, and 15 years after similar UK legislation was
enacted, things would have improved.  I wonder if the Electronic
Frontier Foundation could use such legislation to get more
cross-platform support from the large commercial interests.

As for the "This won't happen, because that application is
commercial": producing an interface standard for Voice Recognition
would allow the open source community to program to an interface
without having to compromise with whatever is on the other side.
VoiceXML is not it, because that is only for the voice response,
"weather in Boston", systems AFAIK.  The incentive for vendors
is that compliance to the interface is another feature to sell.

A common interface would probably start as a lowest common
denominator, so this would not solve the "only one good
(unfortunately commercial) system" problem immediately.  But a
standard could drive innovation in some cases.  This hasn't worked
perfectly for HTML and browsers, but it has worked to some extent, I
think.

        Hugh