Digital Newspaper RFP

From: DAVID ANDREWS (72157.3547@compuserve.com)
Date: Thu Feb 17 1994 - 11:15:53 PST


                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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