Just as an aside whilst you are mentioning the PenFriend, is there any news on the development of laundry-friendly labels yet?
All the best, Barry G----- Original Message ----- From: "Pauline Lawler" <paulinelawler14@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: <access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Thursday, July 01, 2010 9:00 PM Subject: [access-uk] Re: Accessible Set top box
Meny thanks for this update. Pauline----- Original Message ----- From: "JOHN" <john.godber@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>To: <access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Wednesday, June 30, 2010 6:48 PM Subject: [access-uk] Accessible Set top box hello, I do hope people will welcome the new settop box and some of you will come and see it at Sight Village along with several other innovative new products from RNIB. It doesn't all stop with the Penfriend you know!I thought it might be helpful to give you now as much of the background to the development of the settop box as I can. So I apologise for the length of this post.There are three elements to our work on accessible TV.First, RNIB has developed a chipset which can be used in any TV, settop box, entertainment centre, DAB radio etc to make it speak. This chipset is now available in the electronics industry and those of you who have picked up the promotion from Ocean Blue can see an early example of companies taking up our technology. Our intention, quite simply, is to take away any barriers, actual or perceived, which put manufacturers off designing speech output into new devices. By using our chipset they can, if they choose, make all new TVs and boxes talk. Like all commercial companies they will do this if either government legislation makes them do it or if they believe there is a commercial opportunity.The second element was for us to get our own box designed and built and made available right now. Making the chipset available to manufacturers doesn't actually guarantee that anybody will make a box. So we've done it ourselves with Goodmans. The box will be available in the high street as well as from RNIB. We provide accessible instructions of course and we suspect that many high street stores won't want the administrative hassle of dealing with VAT exemption forms. But it's just up to you where you want to buy it! It's your choice.We hope that it will also feature in the government Help scheme for the digital switchover. And, of course, if manufacturers do start to pick up on accessibility in the mainstream there will be new products at lower prices and with better functionality round the corner so, just like everybody else, it will be almost impossible to know when will be the right time to buy a box because the day after you take the plunge somebody will advertise one twice as good for half the price. but that's just life!The third element was to make technology which manufacturers and broadcast distributors (like Sky and Virgin) could use to make an add-on box to make their existing set top boxes talk without having to roll out whole new boxes. . Again it is up to those companies to decide just how they implement their own solutions. What we have done is make it possible for them and other manufacturers to offer accessible products at very low additional cost.So we will continue to work with and apply pressure to companies to bring out more accessible products as soon as possible. However nothing works better than individual blind people contacting companies and saying clearly why accessibility is so important.We will also be developing a PVR with recording capabilities ourselves which we intend will also be able to recieve our magazines, newspapers and books for download too. But I can't right now give you an accurate date for that to be ready.As you may imagine it is difficult to get it right when it comes to sharing information about things in development. It is so easy to raise expectations only to disappoint customers because something has slipped in the schedule or problems that weren't anticipated have come up.So I am being as open about what we are doing and why as I think makes most sense now. I won't put a blow by blow account on this list to monitor progress over the next few months. I just hope that based on the information above and on you seeing developments like the Penfriend that you will trust the folks here in RNIB Products are definitely on your side and working as hard as we can to remove barriers and make life that bit more accessible for us all. We're just as mad as the rest of you that sometimes things which seem so straightforward and obvious take so long to become real.With good wishes, John Godber Head of Products and Publications -- I am using the free version of SPAMfighter. We are a community of 7 million users fighting spam. SPAMfighter has removed 170 of my spam emails to date. 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