ABSTRACT
When Vannevar Bush, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s chief scientifi c adviser, published the essay As We May Think (1945), calling for understanding rather than destruction in scientifi c research, he laid the groundwork for the web as it now exists. He envisioned a “collective memory machine” that would transform the information revolution into a knowledge revolution. His essay predicted the emergence of hypertext, personal computers, the World Wide Web, scanners, speech-recognition, print-on-demand, digital photography, mashups, and Wikipedia. For Bush, collaboration and ease of access were essential features of the “memex” or “mechanized private fi le and library” (ibid: 9) on which people would store and access both personal and public materials:
While Bush did not mention people with disability, the emphasis on speech-recognition and the ability to insert personal comments following “pertinent
items” signals toward features of assistive technologies developed for people with disability such as screenreading, dictation, and research and collation tools that everyone can benefi t from.
