IBM Home Page Reader


Home Page Reader 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.
The screen reader met World Wide Web Consortium 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on the Hpr mailing list that IBM does not have plans for any further updates of HPR and the software was subsequently withdrawn from sale by IBM in December 2006.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.
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.

System requirements

Hardware Requirements

Hpr had the following hardware requirements:
Hpr had the following software requirements: