ACCESSING CONSUMER ELECTRONICS

The following letter was originally published in the March, 1995, issue of Stereo Review and reprinted in the Autumn, 1995, issue of The Observer, the newsletter of the NFB of Montana.

I am blind. For most of this century, we blind people have been among the most enthusiastic consumers of home audio and entertainment equipment. Many of us have huge music collections, and we enjoy radio and, yes, television. We have usually competed on equal footing with our sighted counterparts in operating, reviewing, and even repairing much of this equipment. The "high-fidelity" gear of the 1950's and 1960's was easy for us to operate. Input electors clicked, push buttons were "up" or "down," "in" or "out," and turning a knob by hand would bring up local radio stations on our tuners in a known order. A recent innovation, "direct keypad entry" of station frequencies or television channels, is also very convenient for all of us. Today, though, I can access only basic functions of many of the new components. My CD player is designed in such a way that I cannot program it. A friend cannot select the SAP channel on his new television set because it can only be engaged via an on-screen menu. Touchplates and multi-function buttons whose operations can only be determined by seeing a display are fast becoming the norm. If the only way to select channels on the new satellite receivers is from an on-screen menu, will blind people be limited to the up-down buttons, stepping through some 170 channels at a time? While all this is happening, however, speech synthesizers are becoming both cheaper and more common. For about $15, a blind person can buy a watch that speaks the time in an artificial voice. Could not some of that voice technology be incorporated into some of the new audio/video equipment, so that menus would speak at the same time they are displayed?

Timothy Hendel, Miami, Florida