Samiksha Jaiswal (Editor)

IBM Home Page Reader

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Development status
  
Discontinued

Platform
  
Windows

Operating system
  
Windows 95/98/NT

Developer(s)
  
IBM Special System Needs (SNS)

Stable release
  
3.04 / 2005; 12 years ago (2005)

Available in
  
English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish

Home Page Reader (Hpr) was a computer program, a self-voicing web browser designed for people who are blind. It was developed by IBM from the work of Chieko Asakawa at IBM Japan.

Contents

The screen reader met World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) HTML 4.01 specifications, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 and User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0.

In 2006, it was announced on the Hpr mailing list that IBM does not have plans for any further updates of HPR and the software was subsequently withdrawn from sale by IBM in December 2006. IBM has given code to be used as a Firefox extension.

It has been superseded by IBM Easy Web Browsing.

The program also had a peer-support mailing list.

Criticism

In summer 2002 a non-scientific study concluded that Hpr did not make any distinction between the built-in keyboard shortcuts for entering different modes and the access keys available on websites. The research claimed that Hprs would do better to use links mode to cycle through a list.

Hardware Requirements

Hpr had the following hardware requirements:

  • 166 MHz processor
  • 32 MB RAM Windows 95/98; 64 MB RAM for Windows NT
  • 14 MB hard disk space; 42 MB hard disk space for HPR and Netscape Communicator
  • SVGA (640 X 480, 256 colors) graphics
  • Windows compatible: modem (28.8 KBPS), sound card (16-bit), and CD ROM drive (quad-speed)
  • Integrated or separately attached numeric keypad

    • Software Requirements

    Hpr had the following software requirements:

  • Microsoft Windows 95, 98 or NT 4.0
  • Internet service provider (ISP) connection
  • Netscape Navigator Version 3.01 or higher
  • For Home Page Mailer, Microsoft Personal Web Server, Version 4.02 required for Windows 95/98; Peer Web Services, Version 4.0 required for Windows NT
  • A mail program set up with preferences, or Microsoft Personal Web Server or Peer Web Services required for mailto: tags

    • References

    IBM Home Page Reader Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA


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