Home Page Reader

A talking web browser developed by IBM Japan in the late 1990s, designed specifically for blind and low-vision users. Home Page Reader combined a web rendering engine with the ProTalker text-to-speech synthesiser and exposed navigation commands through the numeric keypad, including heading navigation, link lists, and a dedicated table cursor/pointer model for moving horizontally and vertically through cells. HPR was widely used by Japanese, English, and other-language blind internet users, and it served as the testbed for many influential IBM accessibility-research contributions (nonvisual table navigation, annotation-based transcoding, Social Accessibility, aiBrowser, Sasayaki, the LogHPR behaviour-logging tool). The product was discontinued in 2008 as mainstream screen readers matured, but its interaction model shaped the design of modern screen-reader web support.