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A F F A I R S Briefings
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Enabling the blind to tune in Margaret Pfanstiehl ('60) learned to harmonize by ear as a music major at Peabody Conservatory, logging hundreds of hours of practice in the pursuit of a better voice. Sound would become her life. Within a decade of her graduation, retinitis pigmentosa had left her legally blind. By the mid-1970s, she had founded a nonprofit radio reading service, the Metropolitan Washington Ear, for others who could not see. Later, she added audio descriptions for live theater, museum exhibits, and IMAX films. Today, her voice--and those of hundreds of others--has opened image-laden worlds to some of the 12 million Americans who are legally blind or visually impaired. In July, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) passed rules making "video description" mandatory in television programming by 2002--about four prime-time hours per week per channel. The rules will affect the major networks, as well as larger cable and satellite providers in the top 25 television markets. Video description in television operates much like closed captioning for deaf or hearing-impaired people. Instead of viewing a line of dialogue along the bottom of the screen, blind subscribers, who have a separate audio channel that runs in sync with programs, can hear trained readers describe body language, action, facial expressions, costumes, and settings. Descriptions are inserted in quiet moments between dialogue. "Someone who can't see doesn't know the next scene is in a back alley, rather than a living room," Pfanstiehl says. "And in television or movies, there are often long silences. Sometimes they'll just show the villain at the end, and blind people will have to call their neighbors to find out who did it." For the past six years, Pfanstiehl and a coalition of 17 other groups, including the American Council of the Blind, lobbied Congress to mandate the descriptions in order to make television more accessible to the blind. She has won several community service awards, including an Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in 1990 for her pioneering efforts. Some Public Broadcasting Service programs have carried video description for the past decade, after Pfanstiehl partnered with WGBH, a Boston area public television station, to help create the service. The next hurdle, says Pfanstiehl, will be making the Internet more accessible to blind users. "If you are shut off from print and computers and television, that is an enormous loss." --JCS
Q&A with Benjamin Ginsberg
A few weeks before the national elections, the Magazine checked
in with Benjamin Ginsberg, the David Bernstein
Professor of Political
Science and director of the Hopkins Center for the Study of
American Government, to learn how he'd viewed the 2000 U.S.
presidential campaign.
How would you sum up this election season?
Does it take conditions nobody wants--conflict abroad, a bad
economy, scandal--to get people to vote?
The major third parties this election have been howling that
the system is rigged.
RETURN TO
NOVEMBER 2000 TABLE OF CONTENTS.
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