RNIB, the Royal National Institute for the Blind, is harnessing information technology to improve visually impaired people’s access to news. Digital newspapers is the first product of the technical research and development department, recently set up by the RNIB to exploit new technology for the blind and partially sighted. A pilot scheme, being run for six months, involves the The Guardian and several users all over Britain. To receive the service, the user must have an MS-DOS personal computer and a television aerial. The text of the paper is sorted into five sections such as sport and financial news, formatted into files and sent to AirCall Teletext using British Telecom’s Packet Switchstream network. The data is then transmitted nationally over the Independent Television Network signals. A decoder card connected to a television aerial captures and stores the text as separate files on the hard disk of the terminal. Once it is at the terminal, the text is transposed by a speech synthesiser or a transient Braille display. In contrast to the other newspaper services for the visually impaired, the user decides which articles to read by using a word search facility or skimming through headlines. Transmitting the text takes an hour and at the moment users are receiving the Guardian at 11pm on the day of publication, but if the scheme takes off the RNIB says that transmission could take place much earlier in the afternoon. Managing director of Guardian Newspapers Ian Wright admitted that the Graun’s reason for co-operating with the scheme was not entirely altruistic as he spoke of the future possibility of extending the service to sighted people with personal computers and perhaps even printers to put the transmitted text back onto paper. Acknowledging the increasing use of automation, the RNIB has set up its technical department to develop schemes such as the digital papers but also to advise information technology designers on how to make new technology user friendly for the 2.5% of the population who are registered as partially sighted or blind.
