All the News That's Fit to Hear

It's half past seven on a Tuesday morning, and this room in a Silver Spring church basement is filled with a warm, pleasant sound. It rises and falls like a thrumming beehive.

Close your eyes, and recognizable fragments start to rise from the tumbling susurration:

". . . that should worry baseball more -- the game's antitrust exemption . . . ."

". . . Patient-owned PHRs differ from electronic medical records -- EMRs -- which are . . . ."

". . . The charges against Desir are based partly on incriminating comments he made to a family member . . . ."

It's the sound of the newspaper being read out loud.

There are eight people reading. They sit in eight padded carrels, of the sort you might remember from high school language labs. They have headphones on their ears and microphones in front of their mouths.

"People like to read certain sections of the paper," Stewart Brown says in the brogue of his native Scotland. "I encourage that. Their familiarity comes through."

Stewart works with these eight readers and hundreds more who volunteer for a service known as the Washington Ear, which for 30 years has been turning the written word into the spoken word for the benefit of the visually impaired.

Medieval monks knew that the way to tackle a seemingly infinite task -- copying the Bible onto thousands of sheets of vellum, for instance -- was to spread it among a lot of people. The same principle works at the Ear.

Each morning when he gets to work, Stewart pulls out the day's papers -- The Washington Post, USA Today and several others -- and uses a red pen to assign each story a four-digit code.

The codes are punched in by the volunteer readers, and the articles are filed away in the Ear's computer system. Users can dial a toll-free line for the next 48 hours to retrieve the stories they want.

Ever wondered how long it would take to read one day's Washington Post in its entirety?

"Twenty-four to 25 hours," Stewart says, or about a dozen volunteers reading for two hours each. "We don't do the classified ads. There would be a mutiny if we did that."