A New Concept in Media: Talking Newspapers

Talking Newspapers and Magazines aims to provide newspapers and magazines in an audio and/or electronic format accessible and navigable by blind and partially sighted people, and others with a disability preventing them from reading the written or printed work.

Visual Impairment: People who are blind or partially sighted (and this is not taking into account dyslexia sufferers, those who, for various physical reasons, such as paralysis and arthritis, are unable to hold reading material and others who may be classified as ‘print- disabled’). For these people, the standard mode of transmitting information – the written or printed word – is inaccessible.

The work of Talking Newspaper involves developing and delivering these alternative methods of communication so that the visually impaired are not denied access to printed information – access that people with sight take for granted.

Introducing News line: Access Technology to Newspapers for the Blind and Visually Impaired In recent years, two distinct methods of attempting to provide the blind with access to newspapers have emerged. The first of these involves radio-reading services. This requires a staff (either volunteer or professional) to read a newspaper for daily live broadcast.

But the system has serious limitations. For one thing, it requires a major financial outlay. As a beginning, there is the start-up cost; for although a few of the radio reading services use regular open channels for broadcast, the overwhelming majority does not. They use the sub carrier waves of FM channels. This means that each blind user must be provided with a special receiver at a considerable cost. Additionally, broadcast facilities, with all that that implies, must be obtained; and staff must be recruited and coordinated. But the cost is not all. The blind cannot read the newspaper in a timely manner, for the sighted reader must first get the printed copy and then read it on the air. Moreover, if an article is not broadcast at a time that is convenient for the blind listener, it is not heard and is lost forever. This first generation of newspapers for the blind is better than nothing, but not much. It has certainly distributed many of its expensive receivers.

Recently a second generation (a newer technology) has come into being. Using this system, sighted staff (either paid or volunteer) gets the print newspaper and read it onto a computer. The computer is attached to telephone lines, and blind persons may call and read what articles they want whenever they like. The blind reader is not limited to a given time for a particular article, and skipping and scanning can be done. An article can be read more than once. Still, there are problems. Mostly they revolve around quality and expense in 1994, a third generation emerged. It gives promise of revolutionary advancement. Established by the National Federation of the Blind, it is called News line for the Blind™, and it has features about it that have never before been possible. It envisions not just the availability of a local newspaper for the blind of a given community, but a nationwide network that will permit the blind of the entire country to have access to both local and national newspapers wherever they go and at any time of the day or night. Early each morning computers at the National Center for the Blind in Baltimore make contact with computers at USA Today, the Chicago Tribune, and the New York Times.

The texts of these newspapers are brought into the central computers at the National Center for the Blind, put into proper format, and sent by modem to every local service center in the country. This can be done in a few minutes. Material for the local channel is sent in prescribed appropriate electronic format to the National Center for the Blind. It is then modeled back to the local service center. The process is quick and efficient.

Human voices are not used anywhere in the process. The reading is done by synthesized speech, DECtalk. It does not have the uneven quality of the voices and reading skills of a group of volunteers, but is absolutely uniform and depend- able. After a short period of strangeness and getting used to, it becomes completely unnoticeable. One is aware of reading the newspaper and not of the voice, which is essentially what happens to the sighted reader: the sighted reader is not constantly aware of the print and the sheet of paper, but only of the text.