Websurfing Without a Monitor; March 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Raman; 1 Page(s)

When I hook up to the Internet to check out the news on CNN, to peruse a colleague¿s latest paper or to see how Adobe¿s stock price is doing, I leave the display on my laptop turned off. The batteries last much longer that way. Besides, because I cannot see, a monitor is of no use to me.

That a blind person can navigate the Internet just as efficiently and effectively as any sighted person attests to the profound potential of digital documents to improve human communication. Printed documents are fixed snapshots of changing ideas; they limit the means of communication to the paper on which they are stored. But in electronic form, documents can become raw material for computers that can extract, catalogue and rearrange the ideas in them. Used properly, technology can separate the message from the medium so that we can access information wherever, whenever and in whatever form we want.