The new equipment will scan text timetables

The new scheme, hailed as the first of its kind in the UK, aims to equip blind people in the Stockton area with portable recorders and mobile speakerphones, which convert text timetable information into speech.

The pilot project, which is being run in partnership between Stockton Borough Council, the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) and Vodafone, has received funding of more than �150,000 from the Department of Transport.

Blind residents will also be provided with portable readers, which uses the latest Daisy (Digital Accessible Information System) technology, to enable blind people to use fully searchable CDs.

The RNIB and Stockton Council are involved in pioneering work to convert local bus timetables to the Daisy format.

'Emerging technologies'

John Kavanagh, senior transport planning engineer for Stockton Council, said: "It's long been our ambition to provide timetables for blind travellers.

"Braille is too impractical and not everyone uses it. Tapes simply cannot be searched and updated easily.

"Using Daisy we hope to be able to provide fully searchable and up to date timetables on CD that can be produced at low cost and are easy to use.

"The scheme is a UK first and we will be working with the RNIB, Vodafone, Nokia and other phone manufacturers and software developers to see if we can develop the mobile phone so that it provides blind people with a whole range of information.

"We hope users will soon be able to locate items and get to know about their immediate environment using emerging technologies."

Stockton, along with other Tees Valley authorities, also won funding to provide a "Real Time Bus Passenger Information System", which will provide blind travellers with 'live' information on when buses are due through their mobile phones.

It will be available to all other mobile phone users so travellers will be able to find out exactly when their bus is due.