	April 1998

Newsline Expands!

Newsline Reaches Montgomery County And The D.C. Area

Newsline for the Blind, the telephone based voice newspaper system designed especially for those individuals who are having difficulty reading the newspaper, will now be available in the Montgomery County and Washington D.C. area. Starting in February, individuals in that area who are not able to read newspaper print with ease, will have access to their choice of several newspapers via the telephone. The use of a touch tone telephone key pad gives registered users the ability to easily choose which newspaper, section and article to listen to twenty-four hours per day seven days per week.

The Montgomery Public Library, along with the Sligo Creek chapter of the National Federation of the Blind of Maryland, are sponsoring this expansion of Newsline with the assistance of a grant from the Maryland state Department of Education. All the articles in USA TODAY, The Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, and The Washington Post will be available to registered users free of cost over local phone lines by 7:30 each morning. Along with these newspapers users will also have access to information on the local channel of Newsline, just as readers in the Baltimore area currently do. Items such as newsletters, (including the Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped's newsletter, and Tapping Technology) schedules of events, information from vocational rehabilitation and other state agencies plus, much more will be available on the local channel.

Newsline is currently available in 37 communities throughout the country and is quickly expanding. So where every you travel, if Newsline is available, subscribers will have access to the newspaper without making a long distance call.

Once again, seniors and those loosing their eye sight can enjoy reading the newspaper. Too many seniors have given up the close contact they felt with their community when they had to give up reading the paper because of eye strain. But no more!

The Baltimore area has had Newsline since 1996 and now individuals in both the Baltimore and the D.C. area can register for this service. The Montgomery site of Newsline will be a local Rockville exchange so, if your call to Rockville is a local call you can now register for Newsline and read, read, read!

This is the second Newsline site in Maryland. The National Federation of the Blind is committed to making all of Maryland accessible to Newsline. Look forward to future sites in Maryland within the next year.

A special event, attended by Louis Goldstein, Helen Thomas, Bea Rodgers and others was held on March 16 at the Davis Library in Bethesda MD. to officially launch Newsline in the D. C. area.

For more information, call the NFB Sligo Creek chapter at 301-946-0653.

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