WESTERN PA. Reading services help vision-impaired

With funding harder to get, nonprofit radio reading groups are finding they need to be creative.
PITTSBURGH (AP) -- Nancy Leverett wasn't born blind, but she has spent most of her 51 years with limited vision. Still, she manages to keep up with the world outside her view thanks to a special radio receiver she keeps in her kitchen.
Leverett is one of thousands of people across the country who rely on close-circuit radio services to get newspapers, magazines, books and even the latest grocery ads read to them.
"I can't just sit in the doctor's office and pick up the latest woman's magazine and see what's going on," said Leverett, who lives in the Pittsburgh suburb of Mount Lebanon.
She listens to the 18-year-old Pennsylvania-based Radio Information Service, which serves about 1,000 people, charging subscribers $20 a year. The service, with about 250 volunteers, nearly closed last month after its funding almost dried up.
With government cash becoming harder to get, nonprofit radio reading groups across the nation are finding they need to be creative to stay on the air.
Thanks to several donors, the Pittsburgh service now has enough money until the end of January, said Executive Director Laurie Anderson. But the group is looking to form a long-term partnership with a university or other group to offset costs, including the space it rents.
"It got harder for all nonprofits. It's really forcing us into looking at what we do," Anderson said. "In some ways, I think this is a good thing. We were hoping to do a long-range planning process and this has really accelerated things."
Radio reading services are typically staffed by volunteers and broadcast on a subcarrier channel of an FM radio station. Listeners must have a special, pre-tuned radio receiver to pick up the broadcast.
Many can't read
According to the International Association of Audio Information Services -- a group of independently operated reading services -- more than 1 million Americans over 40 are blind and 2.4 million are visually impaired. And there are dozens of other health and cognitive conditions, from dyslexia to macular degeneration to Parkinson's disease, that affect a person's ability to read.
The radio services are vital, listeners and operators say, because they can present information over the radio that visually impaired people can't get anywhere else.
Some telephone call-in services or computer-based programs are available for the visually impaired, but those services are often impractical or too expensive.
Some of the material can be recorded on tape. But there is little value in listening to a tape of a newspaper a day or two after it is published, listeners say.
"You don't know what it's like until you can no longer read and then all those signs and words and things that are out there -- just everything, you can't see," said Margaret Chase, executive director of Central Kentucky Radio Eye Inc. "We're talking about people who are your mother, your father, or your grandfather. Or in ten or 20 years, it could be you."
To cope with a cash crunch in Arizona, several regional reading services across the state combined to form Sun Sounds of Arizona, hoping to garner more recognition -- and contributions -- for their work.
"Because we're a statewide presence, we all use the same name. People are more likely to hear about us, even granters or foundations," said Bill Pasco, the group's executive director, who is blind.