America’s National Public Radio is promoting scrolling text for US digital radios. No manufacturer has yet committed to bring the technology to market, but it is backed by National Public Radio and the Harris Corporation.

NPR and its partners displayed a prototype text radio at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

NPR’s chief technology officer Mike Starling says the group hopes to bring in commercial broadcasters, radio manufacturers and other industry players.

Australian is further down the track than America with such technology.

Starling says he hopes text based broadcasts will become a new standard in radio, just as HD digital broadcasting’s audio services did several years ago.

The text service will rely on HD Radio technology, which allows broadcasters to split their signal into multiple transmissions. Some stations use the extra capacity to broadcast additional music or talk radio channels, which can be heard on HD Radio receivers.

The consortium eventually hopes to find software to translate speech into written text and automate the service and reduce the cost to provide it so a wider variety of radio stations can offer it.

The text-scrolling feature is one of several technologies that NPR, Harris and the new research centre at Towson University are developing to make programming more accessible to deaf and blind people.

The group also is working on making radios able to provide audio cues for the blind and visually impaired that would indicate what frequency the radio is tuned to, among other functions, and giving greater access to services such as InTouch Networks, which provides broadcasts and online audio feeds of volunteers reading from newspapers and magazines.