Digital Eyes June 2007 now complete

INTRODUCTION AND STATISTICS - Dear readers I hope you all have been enjoying the blindnews service and have found at least some articles of interest. I'm just about finished now on the June 2007 section of the Digital Eyes database through my work on this the blindnews@blindprogramming.com mailing list.

Taking a look back at the accumulated postings, a quick adding up reveals that we've submitted a total of 2844 articles over the last 6 month period. This averages out to 16 posts per day. With no repeats! As far as I'm aware no other news service has met this volume delivery level within the "blindness in the media " field. Neither has any been as up to date or as internationally diverse.

I am a single volunteer working from home at finding and submitting blindness and visual impairment related news articles for a mailing list, this is done on a not-for-profit basis and is a service primarily intended for the benefit of blind or visually impaired individuals.

I am also the former editor of "Stories Making News in the Blind Community" for ACB Radio and the editor of my own news link site www.vipnews.org.uk which is hosted by the National Library for the Blind. For more information please see my blog at

www.leongilbert.org

WOULD ALL LIST SUBSCRIBERS PLEASE BE AWARE OF THE FOLLOWING:-

++COPYRIGHT ISSUES - For all articles submitted the original publisher, the published date, the author and contact details are given where provided, along with a source URL linking to the original article. In all cases the copyright of the content of articles delivered via this service remains with the original publisher. As the terms and conditions of the diverse publications' included varies greatly, particularly in international situations, in all cases the original publisher of the article should be contacted for consent for reproduction rights. If you do not do so it is at your own risk!

That said, in most cases where an article is available on the open world wide web at no cost and requiring no subscription or fee to access, and where it contains "print this article" or "email this article" links, it has been considered to be accessible to the Public Domain and this is compliant with the Copyright (Visually Impaired Persons) Act 2002 of the United Kingdom, where I reside. More information on this Act can be found at

http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2002/20020033.htm

++ACCESSIBILITY - All articles are sent in plain text format making them especially compatible with and accessible to, the various technologies used by blind and visually impaired people, including screen reader software, magnifier software, speech synthesisers, RSS Readers, braille displays, adaptive mobile phones and PDA's. The vast majority of our 600+ subscribers are dependent on these technologies and feedback on the service's accessibility has been very positive.

++GEOGRAPHIC HELP - To assist with monitoring country codes are given, for example UK, USA, Canada or other named country. Interestingly Google News does not include the US country code when listing publications from the United States of America, so we have been quite pioneering at blindnews with regards to this. To quote an example, for an article listed on Google News as from "The Boston Globe", we will cite the publisher as "The Boston Globe, MA, USA." The "MA" is the US state code for "Massachusetts" and citing the country saves it from being confused as coming from Boston in Lincolnshire UK.

For those interested a full list of the US State Codes can be found at
http://www.usps.com/ncsc/lookups/abbr_state.txt
And a list of all countries' internet country codes, can be found at
http://ftp.ics.uci.edu/pub/websoft/wwwstat/country-codes.txt

There is also a large number of duplicate county names among the United States' 3077 counties, and thus providing the state code of US publishers also helps to clarify the source region of articles. For more information see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_common_U.S._county_name_etymologies
which reveals for example that in the USA there are no less than 31 different Washington Counties.

Certain publications we may include articles from are internet based with no specific geographic location other than online (for example ZDnet, or some blogs). But in all cases the publisher has been identified and cited and is fully credited with, their original work. Any list subscriber found to be forwarding articles without citing the original source publisher will be unsubscribed from our list with immediate effect.

++TRACING PUBLISHERS - To find the home page and/or copyright terms and conditions of any article's publisher, subscribers may follow the URL to the original source article in their web browser, and search that.

However in many cases the original article may not be very screen reader accessible, and may feature for example adobe flash, pop-up windows, unlabelled graphics, captcha's or any of the plethora of web page obstacles that exist (sadly) for blind people. It is helpful to know that an article's source URL usually contains the homepage address of the publisher at it's base, from where contact information can normally be found.

++LIABILITY - The blindnews@blindprogramming.com mailing list is a voluntary "news by email" research and delivery service, and we accept no liability for the content of media articles published by outside parties. In order to be able to provide this news service effectively and efficiently a large amount of voluntary online research has been undertaken. But we do not necessarily endorse any commercial product, political/religious viewpoint, service or attitude mentioned, or language used in news articles, and accept no responsibility for errors or omissions. We will however remove any article from our archives upon written request by the publisher(s). In no event shall we be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, punitive or consequential damages - of any kind whatsoever - with respect to information delivered via our service.

++DAILY (DAY) READING, & EMBARGOES - All submitted news articles are dated and usually around 24 hours has passed since their original publishing. However in some cases due to differences in International Time Zones, that time gap may vary considerably. I am 8 hours ahead of US Central Time, and 13 hours behind Sydney Australia. Therefore sometimes the date an article was published on may vary from the date delivered. Occasionally older news articles - as far back as 30 days - will be submitted if they were found after the date of publishing but nonetheless considered relevant. In all cases if any news article is expressly embargoed to a specific date and time, that embargo has been honoured by our service.

In some cases as an individual I may be ill or unable to attend to list posting, I will try to notify the list if do however I cannot not possibly manage to do so every time it happens.

++VOLUME - We have had a number of people comment on the service's news volume, and guess what, nobody has ever said that it is too low! I sincerely apologise to those people who have had traffic jam issues at their end, and advise you strongly to read the unsubscription instructions carefully. It may also be useful to know that the email can be filtered in your email client, making it easier to divert the content you are most interested in to it's own folder. In most cases one read of the subject line should be enough to inform you whether or not to press the delete key.

++DIGITAL EYES - The Digital Eyes database now contains almost 20,000 media articles, is fully searchable via keyword, and is available online at

http://www.geoffandwen.com/blind

This is a unique and valuable resource well worth searching for blindness related information, whether by area or topical key word.

++OUR RSS FEEDS - Day Reading itself is a constant challenge, often requiring considerable time and effort to keep up with the latest news possible. Within the main topic which is very wide there are a range of subtopics, some of which are available as RSS feeds as detailed below.
The following are the URL's of the topical RSS feeds currently available from BlindNews, the newest one, our 15th feed, was added in January 2007 and is "Education".:

ARTS
http://GeoffAndWen.com/BlindNewsRSS.asp?keyword=arts
ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGY
http://GeoffAndWen.com/BlindNewsRSS.asp?keyword=assistive%20technology
BLIND AND VISUALLY IMPAIRED WRITERS
http://GeoffAndWen.com/BlindNewsRSS.asp?keyword=blind%20and%20V%20I%20writers
CAMPAIGNS AND LEGAL
http://GeoffAndWen.com/BlindNewsRSS.asp?keyword=campaigns%20and%20legal
CHARITIES
http://GeoffAndWen.com/BlindNewsRSS.asp?keyword=charities
CRIME
http://GeoffAndWen.com/BlindNewsRSS.asp?keyword=crime
EDUCATION
http://GeoffAndWen.com/BlindNewsRSS.asp?keyword=education
EMPLOYMENT
http://GeoffAndWen.com/BlindNewsRSS.asp?keyword=employment
ENVIRONMENT
http://GeoffAndWen.com/BlindNewsRSS.asp?keyword=environment
GUIDE DOGS
http://GeoffAndWen.com/BlindNewsRSS.asp?keyword=guide%20dogs
MISCELLANEOUS
http://GeoffAndWen.com/BlindNewsRSS.asp?keyword=miscellaneous
POSITIVE ACHIEVERS
http://GeoffAndWen.com/BlindNewsRSS.asp?keyword=positive%20achievers
SPORTS
http://GeoffAndWen.com/BlindNewsRSS.asp?keyword=sports
VISION RESEARCH
http://GeoffAndWen.com/BlindNewsRSS.asp?keyword=vision%20research
WEB ACCESSIBILITY
http://GeoffAndWen.com/BlindNewsRSS.asp?keyword=web%20accessibility

Simply copy these URL's into your feed reader to connect to them. The feed length of each feed is 50 articles, meaning that using RSS Reading software people can access the most recent 50 articles posted on any given topic. The Firefox Web Browser, Internet Explorer 7, Accessible RSS or a whole range of different RSS reading systems which are accessible to blind people, may be used to connect to these feeds.

++THE FUTURE - Much as I do intend to continue my voluntary service to this list to the best of my abilities, there are times when I will need to take breaks. I will try to bridge any gaps caused by this but as a hard working volunteer in a moving and volatile online media environment this won't always be possible. I will however do my best during 2007 to keep our unique and unmatched service as dynamic as possible, and as reliable and informative as ever.

We currently run this service for free and hope to be able to continue to do so on that basis, however our volunteers claim no expenses for their work and meet all the hosting costs themselves. We therefore would still appreciate any offers of sponsorship, donations or technical assistance that may help us to keep the blindnews service going this year. Please write to
blindnews-owner@blindprogramming.com

Or to my personal email at lwg@blueyonder.co.uk

If you feel you may be able to help.

Lastly I would like to conclude by thanking my colleague across the sea, Geoff Stephens (who is the blindnews list owner), for his technical support. And to James Homme of blind programming for his assistance with hosting. From thousands of miles away! And of course, to thank you the subscribers, without whom this world-spanning information service would not exist.

I hope you've all enjoyed reading during the year so far & my best wishes and sincerest regards to all.

Leon W Gilbert (in Middlesex, UK)

Volunteer Day Reader, blindnews@blindprogramming.com
RSS Feed Editor, ACB Radio, www.acbradio.org (these feeds are pending updates!)
Editor & Site Owner, www.vipnews.org.uk (hosted by NLB)
Co-founder & webmaster, The Accessible Friends Network, www.tafn.org.uk
Personal email - lwg@blueyonder.co.uk
Skype ID - leongilbert2006

--BlindNews mailing list
To contact a list moderator about a problem or to make a request, send a message to BlindNews-Owner@BlindProgramming.com
The BlindNews list is archived at:
http://GeoffAndWen.com/blind/
To address a message to all members of the list, send mail to: BlindNews@blindprogramming.com
Access your subscription info at: http://blindprogramming.com/mailman/listinfo/blindnews_blindprogramming.com
To unsubscribe via e-mail: send a message to
BlindNews-Request@BlindProgramming.com
with the word unsubscribe in either the subject or body of the message.