Which is why LineOne is doing what it is doing to survive.The Beeb’s ad dilemmaI was enchanted this week by a PR stunt (somebody shoot me), as a children’s Ladybird-style book called A Guide to Shopping on the Internet landed on my desk. It was from BBC Worldwide’s shopping portal, Beeb , and reminded me of long-forgotten heroes such as Rapunzel and my own favourite, the Elves and the Shoemaker.Here, in the midst of a money-grabbing, brand-conscious industry was an innocent gem A bit like the BBC, you might think. Well, the BBC is under close scrutiny following news that it is considering taking advertising on BBC Online, contradicting its staunchly independent brand.Analysts have been shaking their heads, saying that the move will erode the BBC’s brand image and bring in only pocket money. Why? It’s true that BBC Online generates huge traffic, but Greg Dyke has ruled out advertising on the news sections, which attract 65 per cent of traffic.Talking of online advertising, the research company NetValue has just launched its latest internet research tool, Ad-Impact, which it claims gives advertising agencies the chance to give advertisers the kind of in-depth feedback on the effectiveness of online campaigns as TV campaigns.Ironically, the press launch was held at the top of the London Television Centre.My fetish for online quizzes was again rumbled when NetValue revealed that half of Thomas Cook Online’s traffic for one month came from the free lottery site Bananalotto.co.uk.

Half of that traffic was me.Lisa.Simmons haynet . Like most internet users, James Gallagher can reel off a list of his favourite websites in seconds. The BBC site gets a mention, as does the British Museum’s online offering. A site called IT Reviews, which offers the latest reviews of IT gadgets, also makes the list. Yet in one very important way, James Gallagher is not like other internet users: he is totally blind and almost completely deaf.

Like most internet users, James Gallagher can reel off a list of his favourite websites in seconds. The BBC site gets a mention, as does the British Museum’s online offering. A site called IT Reviews, which offers the latest reviews of IT gadgets, also makes the list. Yet in one very important way, James Gallagher is not like other internet users: he is totally blind and almost completely deaf.
With at least 95 per cent of what we learn reaching us via our eyes and ears, it is hard to fathom the extent to which many deaf-blind people find their communication and access to information affected, making the internet an unlikely home for the 23,000 deaf-blind people who currently live in the UK.Whatever you may think of the internet, it would be hard to imagine a more visual medium.

While television can be enjoyed from the next room, or without paying attention to what is on the screen, the internet relies upon user interaction to operate effectively.However, against all odds, a small but growing group of deaf-blind users have embraced the internet with gusto, not only in terms of extracting information from it, but also by adding content, with a number of websites and newsgroups they themselves have created.Gallagher, for example, is the creator and editor of the A-Z of Deaf-blindness ( www.deaf-blind ), a site which he has developed and funded himself. The most noticeable thing about this site is the overwhelming amount of information available on deaf-blindness, yet the lack of any on Gallagher himself.”That decision was intentional,” he explains. “When I started working on my site there were no real sites about deaf-blindness in the UK, only a few US-based sites. I wanted to develop a UK site in order to help other deaf-blind people and to try, in a little way, bring more awareness to the sighted-hearing about people with deaf-blindness.”Most questions that James is asked come back to the same thing: how does a deaf-blind person actually use the internet? Inputting information is the easy part; deaf-blind sufferers, like blind people, can often touch type on a Braille or regular keyboard without too much trouble. Getting information out of the computer is more of a challenge. Once explained, however, the actual mechanics involved seem surprisingly straightforward.Because he is deaf as well as being blind, Gallagher is unable to use a speech synthesiser to let him access a computer. Instead, he uses something called a Refreshable Braille Display which is an electronic device used to read the text a computer sends to the monitor.