That is an interesting thought. It would take a couple of things
for this to come about. The crawls at the bottom of the screen
never appear as ASCII text in your television. They are just
pixels lit up to form letters and numbers by a character
generator at the television studio wherever that happens to be.
The last time it was something that a speech synthesizer could
handle was just before the data were fed in to the CG or
character generator.

	To easily cause a viewer to hear those data, it would be
necessary to either feed it in to a speech synthesizer at the
studio and send it out over the Second Audio Program or SAP
channel or send the data over something like the closed-caption
system. Regular viewers would see the CG graphics and viewers
with a special television would be able to hear a synthesized
voice read the text.

	To actually turn CG graphics in to speech would require
a full OCR program plus the speech synthesizer, basically a
fully-working computer inside your television, not just a couple
of chips. I don't know how much secondary capability was
designed in to the new NTSC digital video standard, but
hopefully, it also has a second audio channel and
closed-captionning.

	For those who aren't familiar with the old system, the
Closed-captions, VChip, and a few other control signals are sent
in the first 20 or so lines of a picture which is not normally
visible to viewers. Special codes used for automatic picture
color adjustment, time synchronization such as the "autoclock"
feature on your VCR, and a few other things such as descrambler
unlock codes in some pay TV systems are all crammed in to those
few scan lines.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Network Operations Group

Bob Martin writes:
> About 15 years ago, I participated in a half day conference addressing how
> manufacturers and broadcasters could make TV more accessible to those of 
> us
> who are blind.  Among the suggestions I made is to install a chip which
> would read those crawlers at the bottom of the screen, those that give
> emergency and programming messages.  To my knowledge, that isn't 
> happening.
> 
> Another grief I have is when they cut to commercials while presenting the
> stock market reporting graphics.  I understand that it makes a nice
> transaction visually but leaves us hanging.  Perhaps they think all of us
> don't earn enough to have money to invest.
> 
> 73
> Bob Martin
> 
> EchoLink Node - 55127
> Please visit http://www.wan-leatonks.net.
> 
>