Which is it, the world's most expensive magnifying glass or an indespsnsible tool.

If every manufacturer replaced every instance of the small print on their existing packaging with a TAG then anyone could use the reader to view the information in a larger font that they could more easily read. Taking the next step and having that same text rendered as audio would prove even more beneficial. That this would be benefit visually impaired is overstating the obvious.

On the manufacturer's side, there are cost issues related to creating, generating and managing the required information and there is probably even a cost to finding ways to say all that needs to saying in 10 words or less making things fit. All that aside, there are benefits to manufacturers through consolidation and translation and since they are described elsewhere we are going to concentrate on the user aspects here.

For the consumer, especially those with serious visual impairment TAGs on packaging could take advantage of text-to-speech technologies to provide an audio representation of text-based information. At present, the processors in phones might be able to perform some level of speech processing but we would not expect a great experience. A web service could return audio that Media Player could and this could be an interim solution but a specialized service like that used by the Microsoft Recite preview where the audio is rendered without launching a separate application would be a better choice.

Ultimately, future enhancements could make the process less clunky and we would hope that a seamless process would evolve to improve the user experience and become a truly effective solution. A lighter weight solution would better fit this scenario. We are thinking that a solution combining Speech Server and a TAG enabled client has a better chance of success, so stay tuned.

Of course, the small print on packaging is not the only difficulty Many other circumstances and situations present problems addressable by an audio response. In any of these situations, the advantage that TAG brings is the TAG Reader's ability to capture the barcode itself. If you tried the tests we elsewhere on this site, you would understand that with TAG you simply pass your phone over the TAG, whereas with other codes you spend a lot more time focusing. For most people this is important but for the visually impaired, this aspect is a deal breaker. It just has to work.

Although it should be apparent that there is no limit to the uses for TAGs. They can provide effective solutions for distinct problem domains but that same uniqueness presents a potential problem. Not all uses may address the needs of the visually impaired and in its present state the creator of a specific TAG would be responsible for rendering an audio result. In other words, currently you would need to target your design specifically since there is no setting you can check to return audio.

So just as there are screen readers that can read web sites making use of "alt" attributes to describe images in html, an effort must be put forward to add similar functionality to the codes and TAG Reader and/or programs based on the TAG API. For instancce, just as there are settings to automatically redirect to a website or dial a number, one possibility would be an audio setting that would redirect properly identified textual information to a web service that would return the audio. In this way, the solution could be applied universally, if not across all codes then certainly over a subset.

Let us take this one step further. A setting in the Reader or Application could set a flag in the information stream to append specific characters to the end of all generated URLs. This could be handled or ignored by the target site. The new routing engine in ASP.Net could be set to manage this without breaking the rest of the address; handling it like an optional parameter. Such differentiation could then route an audio response wherever available.

Now that would be an invaluable tool but to start we would settle for any setting at all.