Audio technology in IT education for the blind

At Hatfield Polytechnic, we have a long history of educating blind students in Information Sciences. This paper highlights the current use of audio technology by our blind students and looks at it in the context of the support environment needed by them. Some of the problems encountered by our students are discussed and an idealised set of their hardware and software requirements is developed. Finally the significance of our own "Intelligent Speech Driven Interfaces" project to this area is described.