RPH Australia is the national peak representative organisaion for a unique Australian network of radio reading service designed to meet the daily information needs of people who, for any reason, are unable to access normal printed material. It is (conservatively) estimated that 18.4% of the Australian population has a print disability - over 3.8 million Australians
Historiacally RPH stood for "Radio for the Print Handicapped" and they began in Australia in 1975 on Melbourne's 3ZZ.
On 23 July 1978 the Minister for Post and Telecommunications announced: "The establishment of a special radio communications service for the blind and other people with reading difficulties."
The federal government began its direct funding of the service with a $250,000 grant in the 1981/82 budget.
Initially using marine band (today's extended AM broadcast band) frequencies, stations in Hobart, Melbourne and Sydney began operating. 7RPH Hobart went to air in June 1982. 3RPH Melbourne was officially opened in December the same year.
By 1984/85 RPH services were also operating in Brisbane and Canberra. After another review, the specialised stations of the service transferred to normal broadcast band frequencies in 1990 and 1991.
Material from the network is heard on a small number of non-network community stations in Australia and on the Radio Reading Service of New Zealand.
Famous quotes containing the words radio, print, handicapped and/or network:
“The radio ... goes on early in the morning and is listened to at all hours of the day, until nine, ten and often eleven o’clock in the evening. This is certainly a sign that the grown-ups have infinite patience, but it also means that the power of absorption of their brains is pretty limited, with exceptions, of course—I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. One or two news bulletins would be ample per day! But the old geese, well—I’ve said my piece!”
—Anne Frank (1929–1945)
“The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger- print of reality upon the beautiful.”
—Nadine Gordimer (b. 1923)
“The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay in the narrow path she helped make, following the contour of the land, but she often profits by staying with it and she would be handicapped if she didn’t know where it was or where it led to.”
—E.B. (Elwyn Brooks)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)