But how true is this statement today? Well - to say least - it is about to change. While hearing impaired utilized web right from start and made it to their tool of choice.

For a user, whose vision is impaired - or is even completely blind, odds not very long ago were very dim, to take part in biggest improvement since invention of TV - World Wide Web.

Test to Speech Engines, Voice Recognition and Multimedia - all these tools have improved situation dramatically - and they far from being in experimental state.

Every once in while you have these encounters, where a customer tells you about his blind family member and how neglected they feel in respect to so many things.

And sometimes - they ask you, what they can do to address this group on their site.

When I started to take on this issue, I was first a little helpless, for this was a whole new area of expertise in Marketing and Web development. But soon it became clear that tools and means to implement something, allowing visitors with impaired vision to take advantage of a site.

The first step were voiceovers - presented as real media. A real bummer. But - production costs, considerations like bandwidth make them a tool, which cannot be applied all time.

And then I re-discovered Agents. Remember those little animated guys, Microsoft® introduced with Office 97? These guys - Microsoft® Agents - cannot only communicate with Balloons and interact with user - no. They can speak!

Utilizing a text to speech engine, MS® Agent Technology, and an Agent of your choice, you can make this cartoon character speak, whatever text you provide. And it is fast and what is more - they can even listen to voice commands and interact - which I will talk of in one of my next articles.

The truth is: · You’re not that far behind · You’ve already got what it takes · You can’t do any worse than you’re doing right now.

Here are three ways you can avoid getting paralyzed into inactivity by hype:

1. The Web is not all Interactive and E-Commerce Web Sites

There are lots of sites — some people call it brochure-ware – that give a company a Web presence for very little money. These sites are easy and inexpensive to put up and can attract lots of business for your company.

The truth is: only 20% of all Web sites currently offer real-time transactions. And that number’s only slated to reach 33% by end of 2000. You keep hearing about e-commerce only because media keeps focusing on and hyping e-commerce sites.

So don’t let “e-commerce” throw you. If you find out you need e-commerce technology — because you plan to sell in real-time on your site —there are a number of Web hosts out there that, for a fee, will allow you to perform real-time transactions (providing you qualify with a bank for a merchant account). Bigstep (http://www.bigstep.com/), Yahoo store (http://store.yahoo.com/), GoBizGo (formerly Sitematic) (http://www.gobizgo.com/) are just three of them.

You’ve probably also heard a lot about interactivity of Web. There are two things you should know. First, it’s all true. The Web holds promise of being first truly interactive mass medium. Secondly, nobody but very well funded Amazon-sized Web sites are even beginning to scratch surface of interactive technologies. Most of technology behind interactive Web sites to-date has been around for years — databases, chat, forums, e-mail.

There are millions of Web sites out there. Very few offer cutting edge e-commerce and interactive tools that press loves to write about. Don’t let these stories scare you — there’s still plenty of room for you on Web at whatever price point you want to pay.

2. What You Already Know About Business Applies to Web