A new devise could show deaf people what’s being said over the radio. It’s a product developed by the Harris Corporation and involves a receiver and screen that would scroll text much like closed captions roll by on TV. The feature has the backing of National Public Radio. NPR put a prototype text radio on display at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The text-scrolling service will use the new HD Radio technology. When radio broadcasters switch from analogue to digital, they get extra bandwidth to use for other transmissions. Texting is just one of the possibilities. To begin with, the radio text service would operate like closed captioning, where someone will type what is being said on the radio into a computer system in real time. One of the big manufacturers of HD Radios, Radiosophy, plans to produce a tabletop radio this fall, capable of providing the transcripts. Listeners will have to sign up and register their radios in order to get an unlock code sent to their radios that will activate the reception. Congress granted a conditional access exemption from most copyright laws for the deaf, so they aren't in violation for receiving copyrighted material in a usable format.
