The Simpsons as read by WGBH. WFMU's Station Manager Ken discovers an extra audio track on the Simpsons that describes the visuals for blind people. He even provides a 21 MB, 23 minute MP3 of a recent episode that is surprisingly listenable. Sure it's missing all the sex and drugs, but your iPod is a handy way to take the Simpsons with you. Are podcasts of TV show audio tracks next? Will we be listening to Family Guy and the Daily Show during our commutes?
posted by revgeorge on May 21, 2005 - 22 comments

Blind student earns M.D. A fascinating article about a guy who overcame innumerable obstacles, not the least of which was people's preconceived notions about what a visually impaired person is capable of. [via linkfilter.]
posted by bicyclingfool on Apr 3, 2005 - 21 comments

The BBC, working with the Royal National Institute for the Blind, has created a perl script that reparses a page, stripping out the text from tables and reorganizing it on the fly. It creates a pretty good visually impaired-friendly version of your pages instantly. I don't know how well it does on complex page layouts, but compare the BBC News site in its typical state to the parsed 'text-only' version, and you can see they are pretty close in terms of content.
posted by mathowie on Nov 4, 1999 - 0 comments