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