Hi folks.  WGBH's National Center for Accessible Media is tackling this subject with a grant from the Department of Education.  Read more about our Access to Locally Televised On-Screen Information project, run by Geoff Freed, here:

http://ncam.wgbh.org/onscreen/

Best,
Mary Watkins/WGBH

On Thursday, May 8, 2008 11:17 AM, Martin McCormick <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>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.
>> 
>> 
>