ACCESS FOR THE HANDICAPPED, INC.
1220 East West Highway, Suite 1222
Silver Spring, Maryland 20910
(301) 587-4617
(301) 587-4924 FAX
19 February 1994
Dear Colleague:
The CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) was
recently established to encourage and support greater access
to mass media for various under-served audiences, including
deaf and hard-of-hearing and blind and visually impaired
people, minority-language users, learning disabled people,
and others. One of its many initiatives is the Print Access
Project which is attempting to spur the development and
proliferation of state-of-the-art, electronic daily
newspapers which will be fully accessible to print-disabled
people in the United States.
The purpose of this letter is to solicit proposals for
provision or development of software and its support as part
of a prototype digital daily newspaper to be delivered
on-line by modem and over the telephone using high-grade
synthetic speech. Access for the Handicapped, Inc. is
managing this project for NCAM under a grant from the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting. A test of this
prototype digital newspaper will take place during a
six-month period in 1994 at the National Federation of the
Blind in Baltimore, Maryland.
Proposals for software and support must reach this office by
March 18, 1994. The funds available to the Project for
software and support are less than $20,000. Reasonable
travel expenses for the software Provider to work in
Baltimore will be provided separately by the Project.
Licensing and rights to software provided to the Project
will be negotiated, with agreements dependent upon whether
the provider is offering existing software or software to be
developed, and, if existing, whether the software requires
adaptation with Project funds. The Provider will be
encouraged to sell the software to future digital newspaper
sites which will be provided with the research results of
this Project. In addition, upgrades to the software after
the initial six-month period will be made at the discretion
of the Provider. Preference will be given to companies with
a proven track record in software development for persons
who are blind, companies which employ blind persons in
software development, and/or companies which have a proven
track record in development of software to manage on-line
and "dial-in" newspapers.
Hardware for the operation of the prototype will be provided
separately. The hardware platform is likely to be a
Pentium-based PC with sufficient RAM and hard-disk space,
two 14,400 bps modems, and four PC-board speech synthesizers
with telephonic capabilities. These modems and speech
synthesizers will service six telephone lines.
The software provided to or developed for the Project must
perform the following tasks:
1. Strip graphical characters and/or control characters
from the electronic version of a newspaper (daily data to be
provided by the publisher in a format to be determined).
2. Automate the coding of articles within a newspaper so
that they can be placed in identifiable categories for ease
of user navigation.
3. Provide a user-friendly, menu-driven computer
bulletin-board system which will permit an on-line user to
automatically download up to three sections of a newspaper
without significant intervention.
4. Provide a user-friendly, menu-driven touch-tone-phone
navigation system which will use speech synthesizers to
"read" the newspaper over the telephone.
5. Acquire or develop a text-to-speech dictionary for foreign
or unusual words to be pronounced correctly by the speech
synthesizers.
6. Operate in a multi-tasking mode.
In addition, the Provider must install the software and
support it for the six-month operational period.
Proposals should contain the following information:
1. A statement concerning your company's capabilities and
history and its specific qualifications to provide or
develop the requested software.
2. A detailed explanation of how each of the software
tasks will be addressed.
3. A timeline and estimate of costs.
Compliance with Equal Employment Opportunity requirements
for Federal contractors and sub-contractors will be
required.
Your proposal should be submitted in triplicate in hard copy
as well as in ASCII text form on an IBM-compatible 3.5 inch
disk. I am enclosing a brief description of the project for
your information. For further information, I can be reached
at 301 587-4617 (v/TDD). I look forward to your proposal.
Sincerely,
Dr. Harold Snider
President and Project Manager
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