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Supporters and subscribers were invited to attend the 21st Anniversary celebration of the National Service held at the Baltic Exchange courtesy of the Chairman, Mr Peter Kerr-Dineen. Speeches were made by Mr Kerr-Dineen, Mr Ben Merrick a subscriber to the National Service and Mr Ted Davis, Chairman & Vice President of The Talking Newspaper Association UK (TNAUK).
Please click on the above images for a larger version
Ted Davis’ address to guests at the Baltic Exchange, 25th May 2004
Good evening ladies and gentlemen
Thank you very much for coming this evening and sharing the celebration of our 21st anniversary.
Just in case any of you are worried about this splendid spread being provided out of charity funds let me assure you that all expenses incurred tonight have been defrayed by our good friends at the Economist and the Baltic Exchange i.e. room hire, food and drinks. We are most grateful to them for their generosity. They could have given us a donation of course but they recognise that an event such as this could provide us with many new friends whose generosity could last for very much longer than a single donation.
21 year ago when we started the National Service we did so with a grant from Government’s Manpower Service Commission. They were concerned at the high unemployment and they offered us £60 per week for each long term unemployed person we took off the dole and employed for 3 days per week. We took on 2 full time and 18 part time employees and all of these except one eventually found full time employment and our project took off. The one exception is still with us. Unfortunately as always Government funds dried up after two years and I found myself on a platform like this at the Guildhall appealing for help to keep us going.
Little did I expect to be doing the same thing nearly 20 years later? It is not because the project was not successful. It has been a great success; the problem is that new technology has moved the goalposts.
In the early days our hardest job was to persuade blind people to spend £15 on a cassette player so that they could listen to their newspapers and magazines. Now we have to persuade them to spend £150 on a CD player or even £1500 on a computer.
Yes it may come as a surprise to you to learn that there are thousands of blind people who use a computer to access their newspaper and magazines and much other information. They do it by using a software program called a screen reader which helps them navigate through a publication and a synthetic voice that reads what it is told. It will read whole articles, single paragraphs, single lines or even spell out a word letter by letter. If you have heard Professor Stephen Hawking you will know what a synthetic voice sounds like but there has been a tremendous improvement in quality as you can hear if you can fund time to visit our demonstration room.
The big advantage in using a computer is that we can provide the whole of the newspaper so that the reader can select the items of interest themselves instead of relying on a sighted person selecting the items for them.
How do we do this? Our computer at head office in Heathfield is programmed using a program, written by a blind programmer incidentally, to dial up several publishers databases, News International, Daily Mail, BBC, Lexis Nexis. It dials up at 3 o’ clock in the morning and every hour thereafter and downloads all the publications that the publishers very kindly allow us. These publications are then subjected to another program that strips out the publisher’s format, numbers all the articles and compiles an index. It then zips them up and despatches copies by email to all those on the subscription list for each publication and puts a copy on the website. This means that a subscriber to the FT will find today’s copy on their computer at 7 am in the morning before you and I have been to collect our printed copy from the newsagent. It also means that we can supply daily papers instead of a digest of the previous 6 days which is the best we can do on a cassette.
The problem with this new technology is that it is vastly more expensive and that is where you come in. Many of you here today are representatives of organisations that have supported us most generously in the past and we are most grateful. We have invited you so that you can see that, although some of us may be getting a bit long in the tooth, we are keeping up with new developments and continually improving our services so we hope you will feel that you should continue your support.
Some of you are new to this activity and we hope you will find it exciting and worthy of your support in the future. Many of you are here as individuals and I do not have to remind you that a large number of small donations soon add up to a substantial amount.
Ours is a charity that gives pleasure to a great many people; it does not concentrate on disasters and disease. Don’t take my word for it there are many blind people here who use our service, do please talk to them and find out what they think. One visitor I had hoped would be here was Admiral of the Fleet Lord Hill Norton, Sadly he died last week but his son wrote to us:
Dear Talking Books!!!!!
We are so often confused with them but we are a quite separate organisation. They accumulate large numbers of books on CD that can be loaned out over and over again whereas newspapers and magazines have to be re-recorded every issue and then discarded. To do this we have an army of 250 volunteers - more than 5 times the number of staff.
His son Vice-Admiral Nicholas Hill Norton goes on to say:
“You provided a lifeline for my father to the world he had been so involved
in in the past. Thank you we shall always be indebted to you”
If you are interested in finding out more about how you can help the Talking Newspaper Association UK then please click here.
If you would like more information about this story, please telephone 01435 866102. Alternatively email info@tnauk.org.uk.
TNAUK Registered charity number: 293656
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