14 DAY TRIAL // It's obvious that reading news and surf the internet are some difficult activities for blind people. Although there are several features that allow them to use some services, a blind man isn't able to read news or any type of text content. Some time ago, Google released an alternative to captcha images that enable users to listen to a code and then write it to visit the site.
Today, T.V. Raman - a blind man that writes articles on the Google Blog - shared his way of reading the news on Google's service.
"Here are some of the ways I use Google News: For topics I regularly search for, I create Atom feeds that search topics on Google News and subscribe to them via my blog reader (Google Reader). Here is the Atom feed for locating news articles on XForms. For topics on my watch list I create Google News alerts. In addition, Google News provides feeds (RSS or Atom) for popular groupings of articles. I subscribe to the feeds for Business and Technology using Google Reader," he said.
"Together, all of the above provide an effective means for me to stay caught up -- I'm usually done with all my news reading during my 40-minute daily commute to work on the Google shuttle. In addition, note that Google News also provides a Mobile version that is very speech-friendly.
For the most part I use the main Google News site, primarily because news stories of interest are mostly textual, but if some of the stories come from visually complex news sites, I often hand those off to the Google wireless transcoder so that it can present me the story in a form that is more amenable to being spoken out aloud," T.V. Raman also mentioned.