Towson to team with NPR, Harris for radio for the deaf, blind

Daily Record, The (Baltimore), Jan 9, 2008 by Karen Buckelew

High-definition radio is widely billed as the wave of the future, and now Towson University is teaming up with National Public Radio and Harris Corp. to ensure that the deaf and visually impaired can come along for the ride.

Towson, NPR and Harris -- a Melbourne, Fla.-based communications technology firm -- announced Tuesday that they are partnering to develop technologies that will make HD radio accessible and useful to the deaf and blind.

The initiative's first fruit is a new International Center for Accessible Radio Technology, known as ICART, to be headquartered at Towson's campus. The center already has earned $1 million in grants from the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research.

Towson University researchers will work with blind and deaf subjects to assess their needs, said Center Co-Director Ellyn Sheffield, a Towson assistant professor of psychology.

NPR will develop equipment and content for users, and Harris will work on the transmission of the new radio technologies, said Sheffield.

"We want to focus on how to create products in a meaningful way for the disabled," she said from Las Vegas, where the partners unveiled their plan at the Consumer Electronics Show.

"A lot of people think they can create products for the disabled but fail to include the disabled, and the products are poor," Sheffield added.

HD radio has potential for the deaf community because visual displays are heavily involved in the technology, unlike traditional radios. A key goal of the partnership is to develop a method of displaying live, scrolling HD radio content for deaf users on portable devices.

Radio offers users advantages they can't get from television, Sheffield said. It is a portable way to keep in touch with the rest of the world, at the very least for emergency announcements.

"Deaf people equally want access to the radio in terms of emergency announcements. That's the number one concern," said Amy Bopp, a co-president of the Hearing Loss Association of Greater Baltimore.

Text radio technology now available is too expensive for most users, Bopp added.

The partnership also wants to develop a way to allow the blind to digitally record and play back the telephone-based news reading services that give them access to newspapers. Another goal is to create audio cues to ensure the blind can use new HD and satellite radios that use visual displays.

"That could certainly be made more accessible," said Christopher Danielsen, a spokesman for the Baltimore-based National Federation of the Blind. "Radio obviously is a medium that's very useful."