Abstract
Television plays an important role in the lives of visually impaired people yet they face considerable barriers to accessing it fully. AUDETEL (AUdio DEscribed TELevision) is a way of enhancing television for visually impaired people by inserting descriptions in the natural gaps in a programme. This article reports on the results of a field trial of AUDETEL conducted by RNIB in 1994. It covers: the television viewing patterns of a sample of 100 visually impaired people; what they find difficult in accessing television; and the impact of AUDETEL in removing these barriers. The results of the trial indicate that AUDETEL goes a long way to improving access to television by enabling visually impaired people to "watch" programmes which had previously been inaccessible and to enhance those which are "watched" regularly.
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