Established by an act of Congress in 1931, the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS) has grown to a program that supplies nearly 23 million recorded discs and braille materials to approximately 500,000 readers through a network of 140 cooperating libraries around the country. During the year, NLS made substantial progress in its goal of developing a digital talking book to replace obsolete audio cassette equipment. NLS worked with other organizations over a five-year period to develop a national standard for a digital talking book, which was adopted on March 6.
Under the sponsorship of the Industrial Designers Society of America, NLS held a national design competition, challenging undergraduate students to design a prototype digital talking book player. A panel of six judges evaluated 146 submission from 28 design schools and announced the winners in June. A display featuring the six winning entries was on view in the Library's James Madison Building from Oct. 21 to Dec. 20.
The Web-braille program continued to grow, allowing access free of charge to more than 4,175 digital braille book files, with 2,078 users signed up by year's end. Web-braille materials may now be accessed directly from the "International Union Catalog" of resources for the blind, which now holds more than 357,000 catalog records.
