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 | In Touch - transcript BBC Radio 4 |
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| 5 August 2003 Listen to the In Touch for 5 August 2003 WHITE Good evening. On tonight's programme we look at the future of the 195 service which gives free directory enquiry services to visually impaired people. And the football commentator who's dedicated much of his time to running a website with a difference and the unlikely interest for blind and partially sighted people of aerial photography - we'll be examining an exhibition of tactile pictures from the air. Now ever since the 195 system was introduced, when BT began charging most customers for its directory enquiry services, there have been persistent reports that it was all about to end. But as with other premature obituaries in the past, reports of its death have been found to have been exaggerated. Well now the rumour mill is at it again and we received these concerns about the future of the service from listener Sue Hinks. HINKS Last week I phoned talking pages to find out a number, they told me that the number will not be free as from the end of August when it's changing. I expressed a concern for visually impaired people because they wouldn't be able to look up the numbers in the yellow pages, so they said well they couldn't change things at present. I rang BT to ask if they knew of this story and they said that 195 will still continue but to be put through to their classifieds or even Talking Pages etc. you'd have to be charged. And I wondered if In Touch could look into it please. WHITE Well of course In Touch can and has. So are there plans to charge either for the mainstream directory enquiries services, which by dialling 195 and then giving your pin number or subsidiary services such as Talking Pages? Well I began by putting that question specifically to BT's head of marketing - Simon Lubin. LUBIN Well there will be no change to the 195 service for customers who have a valid pin number, they will continue to enjoy free directory enquiries as they currently do - there's no change to that whatsoever. WHITE Alright, what about the situation if it isn't my Auntie Lil in Bath that I want to check on but say I actually want to find out a list of plumbers in Bristol, will I still be able to do that through you by dialling 195 or with a 118 number? LUBIN What we're looking at doing is enabling 195 customers to be able to search for a classified number on 195 directly through us, so that there won't be a need to then transfer the call on to Talking Pages. WHITE So when you say you're looking to do that is that a guarantee that you will be able to do that? LUBIN It's something that we're looking at. There is a question, it's a technical issues, in that the calls come into certain call centres and we have to make sure that those - that the call centres that the calls are coming in to have access to the classified database to be able to actually answer a customer enquiry. That work is ongoing and I should be able to confirm that that is the situation in the next couple of weeks. WHITE Okay, well before we actually knew that that was on offer we naturally were talking to Talking Pages about what they might be able to offer. This is what John Salmon of Talking Pages told us. SALMON There's an absolute guarantee from us that in the future, irrespective of the deregulation of the 192 directory enquiry services, that for any blind or partially sighted person who wants to get information, wants to find, for instance, a plumber in Reading, doesn't know the name of the business, if they go through 195 they will have a free information service provided. If you're blind or partially sighted then what we will be doing in the near future is setting up a system by which we inform those people, who we want to give a good service to, that there is a free service and that they should be going through 195 and 195 will actually put them through to our specialist advisors down in the Bristol call centre, who will be able to provide free of charge yellow pages and type information. It won't technically be the 118 24/7 service but we'll be running this in parallel basically. WHITE John Salmon of YEL. Now of course from our listeners points of view perhaps it doesn't matter too much whether they get it simply from you, Simon Lubin, or whether they get it through YEL as it were but I think it would be helpful to clarify - you've listened to what John Salmon said - will it be your service or will it be a service which you put people through to controlled by YEL? LUBIN Well let's make it absolutely clear. When customers dial 195 they're coming through to a BT operator centre. At the moment we pass that call on to Talking Pages because it's a free service, 0800 number, so the customer doesn't pay - that's the way it's set up. And it traditionally has been that way because when it was set up Yellow Pages and BT were one company. Now as you know they're now separate companies. The easiest and the cleanest way to do this is for the customer to dial 195 and get either an A-Z residential business listing or a classified listing and we're just finalising the last details to enable that to happen and as soon it does we'll be able to announce it to your listeners. WHITE But as far as you're concerned when the 118 numbers come in you are saying to me categorically visually impaired people will get the same service and will not lose any of that service and will not pay any money, as indeed they don't now? LUBIN Absolutely and BT takes its public service obligations very seriously in this respect and that has always been the case - 195 will remain as it is, we will sort out the classified searching aspect of it, which is a broader service that we really want our customers to be able to enjoy, both in terms of paid for customers and customers that currently enjoy 195 services. WHITE Simon Lubin, thank you very much. It's good to know there's so much competition to offer us a free service. If you still have concerns about this let us know, you can call our Radio 4 Action Line on 0800 044 044. Now remember this? FOOTBALL COMMENTARY And England really do need to spend a little more time in the Spanish half of the field and that's what Darren Cook's trying to do now. He's got a shot on goal, can he shoot? He shoots and scores. WHITE That's the sound of an England goal, always good to treasure them, from the recently concluded blind football championships held in Manchester a couple of weeks ago. The commentator there was Bill Teal, who over the past two years or so has dedicated much of his time to creating and maintaining a website with a difference for visually impaired people. The UK Audio Network can be accessed without the use of a screen reader. And what that means is that we can all have a bit of a break from the droning synthetic voice when we visit it. Well we sent our reporter Mani Djazmi to find out more about the website and to meet the man behind it. ACTUALITY MUSIC WEBSITE VOICE Welcome and thank you for choosing the UK Audio Network. TEAL It's a website that's based in audio. Every single page talks to you and every single page has like a telephone menu system where you can press the numbers on a standard keyboard to change the pages. MUSIC WEBSITE Yes welcome to the website designed for blind and visually impaired users. While you're in this site you don't need to use your screen reader or any other adaptive technology product in order to use the site effectively. Here's how it works. DJAZMI Two years ago Bill Teal gave up a £12,000 a year sales job to set up and run the UK Audio Network for nothing. TEAL This is how it should be, where there's no worries about - I mean you'll know yourself actually - surfing the net, you don't know what's on the next page, you don't know if your adaptive equipment's going to be flummoxed by something that a web designer's done. ACTUALITY WEBSITE There's more accessible and interactive fun and trivia if you press number 2 for the games room, with music quizzes, general knowledge … DJAZMI Amongst other things the website allows visitors to listen to full BBC Radio schedules, coverage of blind sports and an audio magazine called Sound Around. However, although the way it can be used is possibly unique, the technology behind it is by no means groundbreaking. TEAL I take an audio file, I put it into a web page, when the web page loads the audio file starts playing, inside the web page there's a list of links that are linked to the keyboard. I would say roughly I spend towards 15 hours a day. It takes an hour or two to do the daily puzzles, could take two or three hours to record the audio quizzes and then there's the encoding and uploading etc., it's all a one-man operation on quite basic equipment. And the funding comes from my back pocket. DJAZMI Here you are a sighted person giving up a decent job to do something for nothing and live on very sort of meagre funds, why do you do it though, what's in it for you? TEAL You can't beat the satisfaction of knowing that something you're doing is unique and of value and appreciated and who needs money when that happens? DJAZMI Although largely unpublicised the UK Audio Network still manages to attract 20,000 page views a month, not all of them British. TEAL We have listeners throughout the globe. I've been actually amazed at the people who do come on to the site - regular listeners like, for example, Jule in New Zealand, there's people in California - you'd expect people from like America and the UK but there's also people from mainland Europe, Thailand and all over the place really and all age groups as well, we've got people in their late 70s and 80s, right down to 8-year-olds who can still complete the 1960s music quiz for some reason. ACTUALITY SOUND EFFECTS WEBSITE Yes welcome to a packed virtual greyhound stadium, where we've got a full card of six races for you today and you'll hear the … DJAZMI In terms of the future what can we look forward to? TEAL Well we had some exciting news the other day about the current Goal Ball tournament that's going on in Quebec, we'll be hopefully getting hold of some videos and we'll be putting the commentary online, so people can enjoy that tournament as live. In the far future, although not too far I hope, we're currently putting together a business plan which will help us get European and government and community funding to take this out of my home office and turn it into a non-profit organisation that will employ maybe five or six blind or visually impaired people to produce the site which will enable us, of course, to deliver more quality and also hopefully a branch out into at least one Asian language. DJAZMI So an idea which was predicted to fail has blossomed into a focal point for a thus far small global visually impaired community. Whether or not it expands depends on more than one man's dedication. But for now in this tiny corner of the worldwide web, rock music stations and greeting cards alike are independently accessible without the aid of synthetic speech. WHITE That report on the work of Bill Teal by Mani Djazmi. Now what in the world have an internationally recognised designer of celebrity eyewear and an aerial photographer got in common? Well they've actually teamed up to create an exhibition of aerial photography now showing at London's Natural History Museum. Entitled Earth From the Air, it contains 150 photographs, 30 of which have been recreated in a tactile form with images, including the World Trade Centre and studies of wildlife. To add to all that it coincides with the launch of a new technological application which is intended to increase the appreciation of photography for blind and partially sighted people. Well our totally blind reporter, Dave Kent, laid down his largely unappreciated holiday snaps, picked up his microphone, in an attempt to find out more about this for In Touch. KENT With me is Chris Bridge, the exhibition director from Earth From the Air. Chris was there a reason for it being an open air exhibition? BRIDGE Yes very much so. We wanted to create for the general public an open exhibition which could be accessed by all in a free open space. The whole concept of why we have now included special displays for visually impaired people and the blind display in particular, the reason we've done that is because we discovered we were excluding far too many people and therefore we realised that it would be great if we could share this in a wider audience. Yann, who is the photographer of this amazing collection of pictures, decided that he wanted to get to a wider audience and as a very good friend of his is an optical designer they were discussing how can we translate this photography into a more accessible way. ARTHUS-BERTRAND The idea came from me three years ago when I was in Paris and we had an exhibition like here outside. We have a lot of schools coming every day. One day the guide asked me to come because there was a blind school coming and I was with these 30 young boys and girls, they were 12 years old, something like that, and I was trying to explain to them my exhibition. So I really have tried to do something for the blind. We have still to work on it but it's not bad. KENT Well here we are at the first panel, Chris what's happening here? BRIDGE Well we've got a combination of a Braille text and a panel which I can read. So it describes what the project is about. Now this is a tactile panel, basically it's exactly the same as the photograph but in a shape. If you have a feel around you can feel two massive things - you're now feeling a very tall item, that is the radio mast of the Twin Tower - there are two towers because they're twin towers - if you go there, you've now to the right of it have another tower. KENT Now I can feel these raised up … BRIDGE That's correct. KENT … and they're smoother than the surfaces that are around them. BRIDGE Basically that is - the smoothness - is to show the large scale of the actual twin tower, which is a flat surface. The sharp things you talk about, next door to it, in fact are skyscrapers in themselves. Now you're looking at an aerial photograph taken at an angle from about possibly 3 or 4,000 feet. KENT This is quite a complex picture really. BRIDGE I would say incredibly complex and therefore it also has lots of shadow and detail in it which the computer that has done the etching has tried to allow shadows still to be there. KENT Shall we move on to an exhibit that's less complex? BRIDGE Yes, let's have some fun, we'll look at some animals here which are dromedaries. KENT Let me tell you what I can feel. BRIDGE Yes. KENT Again I can feel a rough surface all around which would suggest to me sand. BRIDGE That's correct. KENT Then we have the raised shapes which all feel of a similar shape and all travelling in the one direction. Now below that I can feel a very definite depression … BRIDGE That's correct because … KENT … what are the depressions? BRIDGE Well that is in fact a shadow shape of the dromedary. The art of the photography is that he's taken a picture from above with the sun shining in a particular way which creates the most amazing shadow pattern. We're talking about a photographer's work which is an art form. He has interpreted a picture, not to show what a camel is like, but he has taken a picture which he thought was visually pleasing. And he's done it in a way which is unusual because he's used the shadow more than the animal. KENT So three visually impaired people here that have visited the exhibition. Paula Nettley, Janet Tuggy and Lynn Holsworth. Let me start with you Paula, did the exhibition work for you? NETTLEY I am registered blind but have quite a lot of vision still and visually the tactile diagrams did the pictures justice rather than some diagrams that you get that have been made tactile are very much just for the sense of touch. These visually are great too, so yes I enjoyed it. And the prints next to all the pictures were very, very clear. KENT Janet have you visited an exhibition like this and did it work for you? TUGGY I've not visited one like this before and I think it did work for me again because I found the pictures were well described, it's interesting to find out what the pictures were of and where they were located. The actual tactile diagrams I think if they didn't have a Braille description by them I wouldn't have a clue what they were. But once I'd found out what the actual pictures were the tactile diagrams made a lot more sense and I could see how each different surface related to different parts of the picture. KENT Lynn did you feel included by it or was there something more that could have been done to make the experience more inclusive? HOLSWORTH I've never been able to see so I was coming from a different perspective. And there were things there that wouldn't have made sense if I hadn't been lucky enough to have one of the creators of the pictures with me and he explained about perspective and shadows and all those kind of complex things. The Braille made a lot of sense. I would have enjoyed it probably if there'd been some audio or a bit more description but I'm glad I came, I found it fascinating. KENT Because one of the things it runs the risk of I suppose is these exhibitions where visual images are tactilely kind of represented is that the pictures become too complex, the ideas become too complex and we almost lose the initial idea. I didn't feel as though I was being lost by it. ALL No I'd agree with that. Yeah definitely. KENT So in a sentence then, what would you say to listeners that are thinking of coming to an exhibition like this? ALL Come along it's great. It's really good and you learn a lot. WHITE Dave Kent with just some of the people who've been along to the Natural History Museum for the Earth From the Air exhibition. And just before we go a mention of a programme, I must I'm very much looking forward to next week, when we bring back to the studio five young people who were regular contributors to the programme when they were, well, even younger. We feature a group who were our child stars over the past decade or so. We'll be finding out how their aspirations then match what they're doing now and who knows maybe causing just the odd red face or two. Do join us for that. From me Peter White and the team goodbye. Visit the In Touch Message Board Back to the In Touch page The BBC is not responsible for external websites |
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