Peter-Paul Koch, of QuirksMode, posted earlier this week about Siri and its potential to drive web accessibility. He envisions a horrible-but-possible future for the web, where digital assistants mindlessly reel off the contents of poorly constructed websites. Where I feel Koch misses the mark is in imagining that the future of interacting with the web will be limited by existing paradigms such as browsers and screen readers.

I think that, with rare exception, having Siri read long-form streams of content to a user is a less-than-desirable interface¹. One of its greatest strengths is its conversational style of interaction, providing a back-and-forth dialog that proves exceptionally effective. If Siri is in the middle of reciting a long passage of text, there’s only one option for responding: interrupt it.

Semantics

That’s not to say that there’s not a future for interacting with the web with voice. Rather, it requires constructing websites not only to be accessible for humans, but accessible for machines as well. There already are initiatives to make the web more machine readable, often falling under the umbrella of the semantic web. One of the most promising trends so far is the adoption of microformats, providing machine-readable chunks of data transparently within existing webpages.

But how does that relate to voice? Let’s use Koch’s example of shopping for Christmas presents:

Let’s imagine I’m the developer for QuickChristmasShop.com, and I want to make my product data available so customers can place last-minute orders as they’re frantically driving to the airport.² I know that Siri can find products on webpages that implement the correct microformats, and I mark up the products on our homepage using the hproduct format.

Now, the following interaction is possible:

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Me	Siri, I want to buy something from QuickChristmasShop.com.
Siri	Got it. I found 12 products on sale there. - Siri displays a list of 12 products -
Me	Siri, please read them to me.
Siri	Red Widget Blue Widget Deluxe Widget - Siri reads nine more widgets -
Me	Great. Have 2 Deluxe Widgets sent to my house.
Siri	I’ve placed your order for you.

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Obviously this is just a hypothetical example, but speaks to the power and potential of making data available in machine readable formats.

To see microformats in action, try searching Google for “chocolate cake”, or any other recipe. Google is smart enough to know about microformats relating to recipes, and provides you extra interface elements to filter your searches (“I want a chocolate cake with pecans!”). The future of accessibility on the web isn’t based in making things easier for humans to read, but in providing machines with enough information to understand what we want.