Accessing Consumer Electronics

Accessing Consumer Electronics

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