Take a step back in time, when low vision accessibility was in it’s infancy. Almost 40 years ago, in the late 70s, a small group of folks in northern Indiana took up the no small task of creating audio recordings of popular print, such as newspapers and magazines. This was one of the first times in America when a large-scale effort saw massive amounts of print being converted to audio for the benefit of the visually impaired. This allowed for thousands to be more involved with their communities, and paved the way for successive technology that would eventually become common place, like audiobooks and text-to-speech devices.

It was quite an undertaking for this small group of committed advocates, but with the advent of the Northeast Indiana Radio Reading Service, citizens suffering with low vision, or blindness, now had a way to stay plugged into the social pipeline, free of charge. Back then, long before web-streaming and digital communications, the radio was the sole source of news for visually impaired listeners. The organization has expanded over the years, reaching out to communities everywhere, implanting new standards of low vision accessibility. To learn more about what NEIRRS is doing in 2015 to accommodate the visually impaired , click this link and discover the evolution of low vision accessibility.