About 30 deaf and hearing-impaired people visited National Public Radio headquarters this election night to watch the words of a the station's returns that they could not hear as they scrolled across a screen.
NPR partners with Towson University and Harris Corp. to provide accessible radio for deaf and hearing-impaired people through a high-definition radio and captioning system.
Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Mike Starling said that stations in Baltimore, Boston, Phoenix and Denver in addition to American University's WAMU broadcast on election night with this technology.
Captioned radio is "an idea for whom the technology was arriving," Starling said.
A grant from the United States Department of Education helped to make it a reality, but more financial support is needed from receiver manufacturers, he said, to help the stations get the equipment they need. The satellite feed will go to all stations from a caption stenographer, but the stations will control their receivers and will need one of the high-definition radios in order to broadcast.
Marc Raimondi, spokesman for Harris Corp., said that his company provided $50,000 in seed money for the project out of "corporate responsibility."
"Our role was to provide some financial and technological support to Towson University and NPR to come up with accessible radio," he said. "The initiative is to make radio more accessible to the deaf and hard-of-hearing community."
Raimondi said that adopting this technology was an opportunity for equipment manufacturers to "serve millions of people" with hearing impairments.
"Something that has been off-limits to them their whole lives is now open to them," he said.
Las Vegas native and Gallaudet University graduate student Rachel Berman says that captioned radio will allow her to share the experience of listening to the radio - and specifically NPR - with her family.
"I'm really excited," she said. "My family is always talking about NPR, NPR, but I'm not able to respond."
She feels left out, she said. She gets the transcripts but it's difficult to make time to read them, and with this technology she'll be able to catch up with the news more quickly.
Berman's friend Adrienne Thal, a staff person in the Office of Disability Policy at the United States Department of Labor, is also hearing impaired and excited about the prospect of captioned radio.
Her boyfriend told her about this new technology more than a year ago and she's anxious to use it.
"It's great that NPR is taking the initiative to open up access in general," she said. "My family is all hearing. The first thing that happens when we get in the car - they turn on the radio, and I can't share in that experience."
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