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	TX: 09.06.08 - Radio for Deaf People Presenter: Winifred Robinson

	Downloaded from www.bbc.co.uk/radio4 THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE 麻豆约拍 CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY. Robinson On the face of it providing radio services for the deaf doesn't seem an enormously promising enterprise. While TV programmes have long carried subtitles, similar captions for radio have remained an impossibility, until now. American National Public Radio or NPR has built an in-car radio that has a screen visible to the passenger, which carries the text of what's being said. Our Washington reporter Jane O'Brien has been to find out more. Radio clip At one on March 31st a lady that was knocked off of a personal watercraft. The injuries that she suffered ... O'Brien Well I'm listening to an NPR radio broadcast coming from a radio that could be fitted into a car and what's unique about it is that if I change my position slightly, as if I was sitting in the passenger seat, text is revealed over the screen and if I'm hard of hearing I can still experience the radio. Radio clip ... the sturgeon is kind of a prehistoric looking fish. O'Brien To explain exactly how this works I'm joined by Mike Starling, NPR's chief technology officer. Starling The technology here in America is called HD radio, that's the digital radio system that's being deployed here in the United States. All those ones and zeros that make it up can be much than just sound waves, they can be pictures, they can be text, they can be any number of additional channels that we can multiplex in and make for specialised audiences. There's this huge population of 23 million deaf and hard of hearing Americans in the United States and they haven't had the advantage in joining the daily radio conversation and this allows that to happen. O'Brien The British version of HD - digital audio broadcasting or DAB - makes captioned radio possible in the UK but it hasn't been commercially tested and would need approval from regulators. Meanwhile America is surging ahead. Dark barking Cheryl Hepner relies on her dog Galaxy to alert her to alarms or warnings she can't hear. But there's no such help during emergencies when the only source of information is often the radio. A leading consumer advocate for the deaf and hard of hearing she began looking for ways to make it more accessible after 9/11 and later Hurricane Katrina. Hepner One of the things that hit me was that we were not alone at that time. Communication was terrible for everybody. Harder for us yes but hard for everybody. The one thing that worked was the little old radio, the little battery powered radio was the one thing that would work when everything else went down - went the phones wouldn't work, when television couldn't broadcast. And so that was the beginning for me that we needed to do something to be able to access that I got into this for emergency and security problems but there was also a part of me that wants the fun side too. O'Brien Well as you can probably tell it's pouring with rain here in Washington. It's a sound that always makes me feel rather melancholy but you might find it invigorating or even exciting if it heralds a thunder storm. The point is how do you convey the emotion of a sound to somebody who can't hear it without imposing your own feelings? That's the challenge for Dr Ellen Sheffield - a psychologist at Townsend University. Sheffield This is probably one of the most difficult things we're going to be faced with. When you insert a level of information we want to make sure that the deaf community wants that information. So, for example, if you inserted a motor con that had a little picture of a person laughing sarcastically, that might not go over really well because that's an interpretation of information, that the deaf community would like to take on themselves, they do not want to be told that something is happening, they want to be able to visualise it themselves. O'Brien So how do you go about interpreting a very atmospheric piece that doesn't rely on speech as its main content, say it has music or natural sound or does that wonderful thing of painting a picture without actually using words, how do you do that through text? Sheffield The challenge is to bring enough information to the reader so that they get a sense of the environment and the ambience and at the same time do it in such a way that they are not feeling that we're being intrusive. And the way we're going to do that is we're going to be designing things and testing it with the deaf and hard of hearing community, there is no other way to do it. Hepner Having the ability to be able to access what's on the radio, personally I find it very empowering to have access to that kind of information. O'Brien Captioned radio for the deaf has cost about a million dollars so far, funded by government grants, corporation sponsorship and NPR. Its first big test will be in November when the system will provide coverage of the presidential election. The service will be fully launched next year. Radio clip ... surface, so just the fact that you hit it .... Robinson Jane O'Brien reporting from Washington. And the built in delay of digital radio allows text and speech to be transmitted simultaneously with most of the transcription done automatically by computers. We are not quite up to that here but you can get a transcript of this report and of all our disability output on our website. Back to the Transcripts homepage Back to the You and Yours homepage The 麻豆约拍 is not responsible for external websites

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