Multimodal accessibility
Humans are usually equipped with 5 senses, and almost 90% of the interactions they engage in involve more than 2 of the senses they possess. Web since its inseption has been always attempting to create interactions which increasingly resemble real human interactions. As result web can not be considered as a place to have unimodal interaction. In fact multi modal interaction possibilities make the web an attractive proposition for diverse communities in diverse situations. Though it all started as a primerilyly text based interface soon graphics and voice found their place in the revolution and web pages started looking more fancy and talkative. On other side of the scene advancements in assistive technologies empowered differently abled users and made web interactions possible for most of the mankind. users want to be online using different access devices like cell phones and web TV. they want to use varied input modalities like hand writing and voice. They expect text, graphic and voice all merged as a single output.
Any organization aspiring to reach all the customer base can no longer restrict itself to use of uni modal interactions. As a obvious effect, multimodality of any interface we think of is a necessity and not an option.
W3C the parent organization of web is already developing standards for facilitating production of applications having multiple input and output modalities. The initiative is known as Multimodal Interaction Activity. In subsequent posts we will try to understand use cases for multimodal interactions and W3C Multimodal Interaction Framework.
Shrirang Prakash Sahasrabudhe
Accessibility Specialist- SETLabs
Shrirang_s@infosys.com
