Interfacing for persons who are blind and physically handicapped

The Library of Congress's National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped serves a readership of about 750,000 patrons with `talking books' and magazines on specially formatted cassettes and flexible phonograph records. Looking toward the future, our technology assessment and research program has focused on digital systems as the most likely successor to today's methods. Digital technology offers unprecedented opportunities to explore new distribution methods such as central or regional archiving with network connectivity. It also allows for experiments in new patron interfacing using innovative strategies such as speech recognition with voice prompting. In this paper we present a brief description of the existing service, a proposed configuration for the next generation of talking book machines and a patron profile. We discuss the challenges and opportunities that would be presented by the experimental introduction of multimedia digital technology to our unique patron population. We solicit comments and recommendations from the research community.