Enhancing access to IT for persons with disabilities

As we advance to a more technology-centered society, where many of our everyday tasks are becoming increasingly dependent upon information technology, the degree of accessibility of these technologies to people with disabilities will become more significant. Despite the availability of assistive technology, many systems that allow access to text employ modes (e.g. Braille, synthetic speech) that do not facilitate scanning or skimming of text. The use of text summarizers that works on full content web sites as well as email can be useful to people with reading impairments, allowing them access to summaries prior to reading entire texts which evidently consumes a lot more time.