BOOKS IN THE SKY SERVICE
The Hon. I.K. HUNTER:
Recently I had the pleasure of attending the launch of the Royal Society for the Blind's Books in the Sky Children's Service. In collaboration with Variety, the Children's Charity of South Australia, the Vodafone Foundation and the Premier's Reading Challenge, the RSB is leading the way in providing educational and recreational resources to the blind and vision impaired.
The Books in the Sky program is nothing short of revolutionary in terms of its ability to deliver information to the blind and vision impaired. It has the potential to increase the independence and educational potential of many children across the State.
Those of us with reasonably good eyesight (and I still include myself in that category-just) take reading the Sunday papers or curling up with a good book for granted. We can skim many sources of information and find what we need quickly, rarely thinking about how we are doing this. Now, through the generosity of Variety, the Children's Charity of South Australia, the Vodafone Australia Foundation and a $5000 contribution from the Premier's Reading Challenge, this sort of independence is available to the blind and vision impaired. Novels, newspapers, magazines and educational materials will be only a click away.
We are all familiar with the old audio cassette system which allowed blind or vision impaired people to read books and journals. The advent of these books on tape brought a whole new world of experience to blind and vision impaired people, opening up to them the world of books and literature. But, of course, cassettes have their limitations. In short, the cassette is obsolete. Cassette players themselves are going the way of gramophones and turntables and, from the client's perspective, there are problems with portability, navigation, the range of materials, long delays after publication, and often poor sound quality.
With the advent of the Books in the Sky program, people who would have once used these cassettes can now download and read most of today's popular books with the help of a device called an Audio Navigator.
Mr President, I need to seek your direction on this. As a new member I do not know whether I can reach for props and display them to members in the chamber; if not, I will just nod in the direction of this purple handpiece on the table. The Audio Navigator is similar, in many ways, to a standard MP3 player, but it is designed with newspapers, magazines and audio books in mind.
The Audio Navigator is what might be termed as leapfrog technology, in that it skips the obvious next stage-books on compact disc-and goes straight to solid state digital technology. The Audio Navigator is a portable audio playback device which has the ability to play both pre-recorded and synthesised voices and sounds and can hold a significant amount of information. I am grateful to my grandmother for lending me her device today to bring to the chamber.
The RSB first explored this technology through two pilot programs here in South Australia in 2003. Twelve readers participated in the first of these pilots, accessing a catalogue of over 300 titles, through three libraries, over a three-month period. In this pilot, reading materials were transmitted directly to the navigators via satellite. This was a small beginning but a resounding success. The second pilot was much larger, comprising 25 readers across five libraries over five months.
517 this time, however, the internet was used to transmit materials, and the catalogue of materials was hugely expanded. For the first time, readers could download daily newspapers on the day they were published. Finally, the national pilot grew out of these two South Australian collaborations. Over five months, 94 readers participated using 12 public libraries with a massively expanded online collection of materials. As with the smaller pilots, the results were outstanding, and we are now seeing the fruits of the project.
I am really pleased to tell the chamber that every child in South Australia who is blind or severely vision impaired now has-or shortly will have-access to their own audio navigator and the independence and opportunities that can bring. The Royal Society for the Blind hopes one day to integrate its Books in the Sky program with all public libraries to make it university accessible.
The Books in the Sky program is nothing short of life changing. It has massive potential for the education of blind and vision impaired children, as well as introducing them to the wonders of reading for pleasure. I commend the Royal Society for the Blind for its ongoing work in improving the daily lives of our visually impaired.