According to the BBC, IBM are set to release a web browser specifically for blind and partially sighted users. The aim of the Accessibility Browser is to give access to and control over multimedia content embedded in websites to those who can't use a mouse for browsing.

Screen readers and self-talking browsers are not able to deal with video and animation, some of which starts playing as soon as a page is loaded.

This often interferes with the synthesised speech output from the screen-reader software.

Using the A-Browser, a vision-impaired person can control media content by using predefined shortcut keys, rather than having to look for the control buttons using a mouse.

With the success of multimedia sites such as MySpace and YouTube it is great that there will be a browser that will allow control over the multimedia elements of the page. I can personally vouch for the fact that MySpace music pages annoy me by playing music instantly. Imagine the difficulty of dealing with that when you're trying to hear the text on the rest of the page. At the moment IBM are concentrating on content compatible with Windows Media Player and Real Player, we can hope that they are able to tackle Flash media players in the future too.

I would be interested to learn how this technology will work with the web at the moment, how much it will rely on following of current web and accessibility standards. It is definitely destined to extend the ability of blind and partially sighted users to use the Internet, which is a great development for the reported 160 million this could benefit. Good luck to IBM with this initiative.