Greetings,
Last month I posted this message to the ACB list. This month, having
received no reports of major problems, I'm spreading the news a bit more
widely. The November schedule is gone and the December schedule has been
put on the website. Please feel free to check it out and let me know what
you think.
John
-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of John Mattioli
Sent: Thursday, November 12, 1998 9:05 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: CCB: making TV more accessible to the blind
+== acb-l Message from "John Mattioli" <[log in to unmask]> ==+
Ladies and gentlemen,
I am very pleased to announce a new link on the Connecticut Council of the
Blind's web page. This link, right near the top of the page, is a link to
this month's HBO schedule in grade two braille. The idea for this project
came from NLS's WebBraille project. NLS has published several titles in
grade two braille files and made them available to a limited distribution
for trial purposes. The NLS staff who were in charge of that project
pronounced it a resounding success and hope to expand it greatly in the near
future.
A few months ago I visited the HBO web site just to see if, per chance,
they might publish their schedule. I was quite pleased to see that the
schedule is available on the site but is somewhat difficult to navigate.
With a little work I figured out how to get a full month's schedule. This
file is qquite handy, but full of periods and other ornimentation that just
takes up space.
As a software engineer, I devoted a couple of hours to developing a small
program that reformats the text from this web page and converts it into a
file that can be read and translated by the Duxbury Braille Translator.
This program is a Windows Console application, that is it looks and smells
like a DOS program, but must be run from a DOS box.
Anyway, to make a short story even shorter, you can now download the
November HBO and Cinemax schedules from the following web site:
http://members.tripod.com/~dmclean/ccb.html
Much thanks to Dave McLean for agreeing to play webmaster for the
Connecticut Council of the Blind.
Ok, so what's really in this file?
The schedule runs from November 1 through November 30. It contains
programming for HBO East, HBO Plus East, HBO Signiture East and Max East.
Those of you in different time zones should feel free to adjust schedule
times appropriately.
Although this file is ready for brailling on 25 line by 40 character
braille paper, I strongly suggest that nobody actually braille it! This
particular schedule would be something like 155 pages. Instead, I suggest
loading it into your BNS, BLT, or other note taking device that has the
ability to handle grade two files. You'll find that this file is 31 BNS
pages.
I hope this is useful to people, please send any formatting questions or
comments to me at [log in to unmask] I hope to get the December
schedule up prior to the beginning of December, but I've noticed that HBO
doesn't always publish in advance.
Enjoy,
John
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