It’s an amazing thing to watch how new platforms and devices move from ‘niche developer tool’ to ‘fad’, then ‘trend’ and finally ‘commonplace’. In recent years devices such as netbooks and the iPad, along with platforms such as Google Android, have certainly followed this path. Android in particular seems to have gone from a hobby OS to a dominant mobile platform in about a year.
The evolution of social media has led to a rapid change in the way we perceive the internet. Two-way communication and mobility across a variety of platforms has meant that far more people, including people with disabilities, are now able to collaborate and communicate online. From the W3C’s perspective, important questions needed to be answered:
The newly included HTML speech input API gives developers the ability to include voice-to-text in any webpage (or web app) they are developing. When a user accesses a webpage that uses this feature, you can click on an icon to enable it. You can then speak into your computer’s microphone and the audio (your voice) will be transcribed into text.
