News service for blind expands
Audio: A federal grant will bring "Newsline" to
thousands more blind and
visually impaired people early next year.
By Kevin Washington
Sun Staff
Originally published June 18, 2001
Asking college students to read the local newspaper every day
doesn't
sound
like an unreasonable request.
But for Meleah Jensen, it could have been.
Jensen, 19, has lost much of her sight to glaucoma and can't read
a
newspaper. Nevertheless, the Louisiana State University sophomore
kept up
with her classmates when her world geography professor required
students
to
read the newspaper in order to answer extra-credit questions on
tests.
"You'd miss some of those questions if you hadn't read the
newspaper,"
said
Jensen, who reads the morning paper in a slightly different
fashion from
her
fellow students.
Jensen and 25,000 other subscribers across the country rely on
Newsline
for
the Blind, a free service that uses synthesized speech to allow
subscribers
to "read" a newspaper with a touch-tone telephone. The
service is provided
by the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), which has its
headquarters
in
South Baltimore.
About 50 national and local newspapers are available to people in
73 local
dialing areas in the United States and Canada. The service
operates 24
hours
a day, seven days a week, with each day's papers available about
7 a.m.
By March, Newsline for the Blind will reach another milestone as
$4
million
awarded by Congress and announced last week will allow NFB to
expand the
program to every state and Puerto Rico -- covering many smaller
cities and
rural areas that don't have access to the service.
Rather than ship the digitized newspapers to local areas for
distribution
to
listeners, the NFB will have a direct, toll-free call-in center
at its
Johnson Street location. Equipment, software upgrades and
telecommunications
improvements will be paid for with the new money.
The expansion is likely to mean a huge increase in use, given
that the
nation has more than 12 million blind and visually impaired
people. The
NFB
will install about 300 lines when it goes national, but that
network most
likely will be overwhelmed, predicts Curtis Chong, NFB technology
director.
Started as a pilot program in 1994 with USA Today, the program's
first
center was in Baltimore, with regular delivery beginning in early
1996. In
Maryland, listeners can make free calls to Newsline in the
Baltimore area,
Montgomery County and the Eastern Shore, but residents elsewhere
must make
long distance calls.
Local sponsors -- public libraries in some areas, private
companies in
others -- work with the NFB and local newspapers to bring the
service to a
particular city, such as Dallas, or to an entire state, such as
Oklahoma.
Callers in each area have access to between three and six
newspapers.
Baltimore subscribers get The Sun and five national newspapers,
including
USA Today and the New York Times, with the previous day's and
previous
Sunday's editions also available.
The grant will allow readers to get any newspaper in the system,
not just
their regional publications and national papers, Chong says.
"Say you're interested in the energy problems in California,"
he says.
"Maybe you're interested in reading the San Francisco
Chronicle (a
regional
paper) to find out more."
With the expansion, the NFB would like to have a minimum of two
newspapers
from each state.
The process of getting the news to blind subscribers begins early
each
day,
when each newspaper sends its daily editions via the Internet to
the NFB
headquarters, Chong says.
In turn, NFB has developed a program that reformats the text into
a form
that can be read with a speech synthesizer -- albeit with a
robotic-sounding, ersatz voice like the one heard on National
Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration radio broadcasts.
Next, the reformatted data -- specific newspapers for the local
area -- is
transmitted to computers run by the local sponsors.
Armed with a local telephone number, a security code and a
personal
identification number, much like the one used with an automated
teller
machine, a blind reader calls into the system and uses the
telephone
keypad
to choose stories from a voice menu that offers a choice of
specific
sections, headlines, authors and search terms.
As part of the upgrade, NFB will switch the speech synthesizers
from
DECtalk
(originally created by Digital Equipment Corp.) to Speechwork's
Eloquence.
"Eloquence sounds a little more human," with better
articulation, says
James
Gashel, director of governmental affairs at NFB. "But if
you're used to
synthesized speech, it's not that different."
The new system will have foreign language capability with the
addition of
Spanish in the future.
From an operational standpoint, moving all of the technology
under one
roof
will make trouble-shooting easier and reduce telecommunications
costs,
Chong
says. States such as Louisiana that provide intrastate 800
service are
currently paying more than the NFB will pay for national 800
lines.
Nevertheless, local sponsors will still need to sign up
subscribers, work
with newspapers and help financially support service in their
areas.
Meanwhile, the best parts of Newsline will stick around. For
example,
Gashel
says, "instant interruptability" remains a must. By
that he means that
when
an ordinary reader switches stories, he or she simply flips the
page.
Likewise, blind readers don't want to wait for a pause in the
system to
move
to the next story.
With the upgrade, users will continue to have control over what
they hear,
including the ability to spell out words, search articles using
specific
words, and listen at different speeds, ranging from several dozen
to
several
hundred words per minute.
That's one of the reasons Tom Ley, 34, of Towson finds it so
helpful. "It
really is like reading a newspaper," he says.
Ley, who enjoyed reading the newspaper until he lost his sight at
17,
hadn't
been able to read one for years. So he didn't have the in-depth
information
that he believed was critical for conducting business and
succeeding in
social situations.
Now, Ley listens for 10 minutes to an hour when he has the time,
choosing
what he wants to hear.
"You can stop in the middle of stories or hear the whole
thing," he says.
"I
think it's great."