The award winning (Visionary 2006 Newsletter competition, second place for Content and Presentation), newsletter of Sight Airedale – your local sight impairment charity. SeeFact is distributed to 534 registered friends of sight airedale.
Registered Office: sight airedale, 1 Albert Street, Keighley, BD21 2AT.
A man went to visit a friend and was amazed to find him playing chess with his dog.
He watched the game in astonishment for a while before saying “I can hardly believe my eyes, that is the smartest dog I’ve ever seen”
“Nah, he’s not so smart” the friend replied
“I’ve beaten him three games out of five”
The next edition of SEEFACT will be in May 2012.
Tapes to be returned, CD’s non returnable. This newsletter is also available on standard cassette or standard audio CD (not MP3) on request. It is important that people receiving a standard cassette copy return it in the red plastic wallet so that we may use it again. If you do not return your tape, we will be unable to send you our next issue. Your CD can be kept and referred to again
The newsletter is also available in Braille. If you would like a Braille copy please contact our helpline
This newsletter is also available via E:Mail. If you would like to receive your copy via E:mail please send a message to antony@sightairedale.org.uk. We will never pass your E:mail address onto any third party.
If you do not wish to receive information from us please let us know and we will delete your name from our mailing list.
The views expressed in this publication, whether attributed or not, do not necessarily reflect views or policy of sight airedale. All information is accurate at the time of printing. Reference to any service does not imply recommendation.
You can help support our work, just by shopping at amazon.co.uk. For every purchase you make sight airedale will receive up to 5% of its value in advertising fees. So far, from the 1st April 2011 to the 31st December 2011 we have raised £123.67 from people shopping at amazon.co.uk
Visit www.amazon.sightairedale.org.uk, for details on how your purchases can help support our work.
The Appeals Sub Committee would like to thank everyone who has given their time over the year helping sight airedale in our street and store collections. With donations collected from our events, gift aid tax payers, donations, humpty dumpty and loose change boxes, in memoriam collections and our 100+ club subscriptions, we have raised from the 1st April 2011 to 31st December 2011 £9,339.70 These funds will be used to meet our services for local severely sight impaired and sight impaired people. A big thank you to all our supporters
If you or a member of your family is a tax payer, we can make any donation you make go further. For example, we can make a donation of £10 actually mean £12.50 because the Inland Revenue will pay the charity 25p in the £1. You do not have to inform the Inland Revenue that sight airedale is claiming tax and it will not affect your personal tax position. If you have any questions about the 100+ Club or Gift Aid, please contact our helpline
We are looking for volunteers to hold collecting buckets at our street and store collections in 2012. Please check What’s On
If you could spare an hour we would very much appreciate it and we will provide car transport to and from the collection.
It costs £311 per day to provide the 13 different services offered to 534 local sight impaired people. For example, it costs £2.50 per person, per year to send out three issues of our SEEFACT newsletter in large print format, free, to Friends of sight airedale.
There are different ways you can support your local sight impairment charity and we would like to mention just one. The 100+ Club annual membership is £10, and is open to Friends of sight airedale, relatives and friends. Your £10 gives you a unique membership number entitling you to enter our monthly draw for a cash prize of £25, of your membership fee £5 goes in prize money and £5 is used towards funding our services. The 100+ Club membership is 136 members.
Remember, you have to be in it to win it
Your name could be here
Contact the helpline for details on how to join the 100+ club
To commemorate our 105th year, why not Join us for the unique experience of Walking across Morecambe Bay, accompanied by the Queens Guide Cedric Robinson.
The 8 mile walk is one of the country’s most popular and scenic. Starting from the pretty and picturesque promenade of Arnside and taking around three hours to complete affording plenty of panoramic views of the surrounding Lakeland Hills and those of Lancashire and Yorkshire.
Date and time to be confirmed in our May 2012 edition of SEEFACT, and on our website
For an information and supporters pack, cost £5, please contact the helpline
The coffee morning raised £120 to be shared equally between Bingley, Keighley and Silsden Social Centres respectively.
Also, in addition, £120.50 was raised towards sight airedale funds.
The event raised £725.40 towards sight airedale funds.
Our grateful appreciation is sent to all our supporters and volunteers who helped raised a total of £968.40 in one day towards services for local sight impaired people.
Q Does the change of the charity name to sight airedale mean anything else will change?
A No, all our services will be delivered in the same way by the same people
Our social centres in Cross Hills and Skipton use North Yorkshire County Council (NYCC) Adult and Community Services minibuses to transport members from home to meetings and return.
We have learnt through the ‘grapevine’ that NYCC will not accept new requests for members transport because of NYCC funding cut backs. This decision, affecting local vulnerable older disabled, people could jeopardise the future existence of these groups.
sight airedale is challenging this decision as NYCC are in breach of “Best Value Statutory Guidance” issued by the Department for Communities and Local Government in September 2011. We need residents in Craven to ask their local County Councillor the following questions:-
If you want to know who is your County Councillor please contact the helpline and ask for Kevin.
As a local society, we value support of local individuals because we are not funded by government, local councils, local health providers or national charities. Support can be given through home boxes, 100+ club, donations, gift aid pledge, regular monthly donations, in memoriam donations, gifts in your will. Please note, sight airedale never telephone you or knock at your door asking for donations, to sell raffle tickets, for donations of clothing or to leave a legacy. It will most likely be a national charity. If you feel you can support our valuable work in one of the above ways, please call the helpline. We do not pass your details to any national organisation.
Why not come and bag a bargain at our first ex-demo equipment auction. We have the following lots available
This is a MP3 player designed specifically for use by people with a sight impairment. It features large tactile buttons, and spoken menus. Please note - you will need access to a computer to use this item.
Featuring 8GB of storage, which is enough for around 300 hours of audio. The iPod nano makes use of “voice over”, allowing all menus and track information to be spoken. The 4th generation iPod still features physical buttons unlike the current generation of iPod Nano’s. Please note - you will need a computer to use this item.
We have 5 basic computers for sale, each one comprising of a monitor (screen), base unit (the PC itself), a keyboard and a mouse. The successful bidder will get a PC running Linux, capable of browsing the internet, sending and receiving E:Mail, and word processing, plus magnification software. Please note that these machines do not have Windows installed on them, although they are perfectly capable of running Windows XP. If you wish to run Windows you will need to purchase and install Windows yourself.
Hand held electronic magnifier with upto 24x magnification, 5 different display modes, Full Colour, White on Black, Black on White, Yellow on Black and Yellow on Blue.
Hand held electronic magnifier with upto 24x magnification, 5 different display modes, Full Colour, White on Black, Black on White, Yellow on Black and Yellow on Blue
This Victor Reader Classic+ will play audio CDs, MP3 CD and RNIB Talking Books. Featuring large tactile buttons it makes an ideal accessible CD player, or if you’re a member of the RNIB library service, you can use it as a second machine.
The PortSet reader will scan a text document and then read it out to you. No computer is necessary, simply place your document under the scanner hit the yellow button, and the machine will scan and read your document. Please note - this item is heavy.
For further information please telephone Antony on the Helpline.
We reserve the right to amend these terms. Amendments will be notified prior to the auction commencing.
Do you have any talking books on cassette that you’d like converting to MP3? Then our new cassette conversion service is for you.
We can convert cassette audio books into either MP3 format, or iTunes Audiobooks. Prices start from £5 for a 4 cassette book, please allow two weeks for books to be converted.
Note: We are unable to convert music cassettes due to technical reasons
If you would like further information please contact Antony on the helpline
The internet opens up a whole new world of audio, In the past to access this audio required a computer with Internet access. Now the British Wireless for the Blind Fund (BWBF) have made this internet based audio accessible via the Sonata.
The Sonata is an Internet radio and is designed to be used by sight impaired people. All menus are spoken, and the user can navigate content by pressing one of two buttons.
Listeners can access local talking newspapers, content from National Talking Newspapers and Magazines (a separate subscription is required), a selection of talking books from Calibre, and catalogues from M&S, Argos and Sainsburys. There are also news programmes specifically aimed at sight impaired people, such as Talking Computers, a programme dedicated to technology.
There are thousands of Internet radio stations available from all over the UK and the world, covering various different topics or genres of music. The Sonata comes a small selection of radio stations, mostly BBC but you can ring up BWBF’s helpline and have more stations added to your Sonata.
The Sonata costs £299 + £25 per year, if you wish to subscribe to the National Talking Newspapers audio service this will cost you an additional £40 for the first year, and then £59 per year. To use a Sonata you will also need a Broadband Internet connection this will cost from £6 per month depending on your provider.
For a demonstration of the Sonata please contact Antony on the helpline.
We’re pleased to announce that our new Digital Audio library is now open for business. The new library is a result of two years hard work by seven volunteers, to convert our audio tape library of 1000 books to MP3/CD. Three volunteers continue to be involved in the library service.
An MP3 disc looks like a standard audio CD, but can hold up to 24 hours of audio. This means a 20 hour audio book can fit onto one CD. Our longest book is the Bible at 83 hours spread over 4 CDs
The ability to fit an entire book on one CD, eliminates the problems of having to get discs in the right order, and makes it easier to post CDs back to us. We’ve redesigned the catalogue to make it easier to read, and if you have Internet access you can access our online catalogue available at www.library.sightairedale.org.uk. Our online catalogue is updated as soon as we add new tittles to the library, you’ll also be able to read a full description of the book (if available).
To listen to our books you will need an MP3 compatible CD player. You can tell if your MP3 player is MP3 compatible by looking for the MP3 logo. Or by looking in the user manual. If you are unsure let us know the exact make and model number and we may be able to find out for you. If you receive audio books from the RNIB or Calibre, you will be able to use their players to play our books. Never put a MP3 CD into a CD player that is not MP3 compatible, as you may damage your player’s amplifier.
We now have a range of MP3/CD players, and MP3 players available for demonstration, to arrange an appointment view please contact Antony on the Helpline.
Our library is free to registered Friends of sight airedale. If you’d like a printed catalogue please contact our helpline with a list of your favourite authors, or the types of books you want. Our online catalogue provides the most up-to-date list of books in our library, along with a full book description (if available).
Once you’ve chosen a book from our printed or online catalogue, make a note of its catalogue number (ie MP30302) and ring the helpline. If the book you want is out on loan, we will reserve it for you. Your book will be sent to you in a red reusable wallet. When you’ve finished listening to the book, put it back into the wallet along with a note saying what books you’d like next, turn the label on the front of the wallet round and drop it into a post box. You do not need pay any postage, as we are able to use the articles for the blind service for registered Friends.
Adventure and Thriller, Autobiography, BBC Radio Collection, Classics, Comedy, Crime and Thriller, General Fiction, Historical Fiction, Religion, Romance, Travel, War, Young adult, Children’s, Horror, Non Fiction, Poetry, Science Fiction, Sport, Westerns.
Do you have any old talking books on cassette you don’t listen to anymore? If so then why not consider donating them to our library so other people can enjoy them.
We’d particularly like children’s books, as we only have a very small selection. Though we’d be grateful for any titles, we do have a surplus of classics.
If you have any books you’d like to donate please contact the Helpline.
A big thank you to all those people who have donated books
You receive an E:Mail message from PayPal informing you that the E:Mail address linked to your account has been changed. The scam is to fool you into thinking someone has gained unauthorised access to your PayPal account. You will then be asked to fill out a form if you believe this change to be unauthorised. Once you’ve filled out the form, the fraudsters will have access to your PayPal Account. A variation on this scam is an E:Mail confirming a payment, you’ve never made. If you receive such an E:mail and are concerned, login into your PayPal account by visiting www.payal.co.uk, there you will be able to see the status of your account, and any payments.
Home Heat Helpline 0800 33 66 99
A free service that provides independent advice to people on low incomes on how to get help with their Gas and Electricity bills, including grants for insulation and new boilers, discount or rebate schemes and other help with keeping warm.
The Consumer Association “Which” have the following advice:-
Many people who live in older houses have little insulation around their water tank, which is estimated to loose 75% of its heat. By covering your tank with a British Standard cylinder jacket you will save money.
Cost of Cylinder Jacket - £15 Potential Yearly Saving - £40
Look to fill gaps around pipeworks, door and window frames as well as loft hatches using foam fillers and draft exclusion strips.
Potential Yearly Saving - £25
Potential Yearly Saving - £20
If you are buying a new washing machine, TV or fridge consider how much energy they use.
With energy costs rising 18% in the past year, it is essential to get the best gas and electricity deals.
Only 18% of people have switched in the past year, 57% of people have never switched.
Potential Yearly Saving £237.
There are now an estimated 2.5 million Blue Badges in national circulation since the scheme was introduced in the early 1970’s. In recent years concerns have grown that many badges are being used by people who are not disabled. This is because the badge is left in a vehicle even when the holder is not travelling in that vehicle.
The changes will see Local Authorities gain more powers to seize badges they believe are being misused. Local authorities will oversee the testing of applicants, a process previously carried out by GP’s.
Also, the new badges will be printed with anti-fraud holograms. The Local Authority will have tougher “on-the-spot” powers to seize badges that are being misused.
The cost of the badge will rise from £2 to £10 and the rise is to cover the extra cost Local Authorities will face.
As from November 2011, anyone wishing to report a crime, seek crime prevention advice or give police information should phone 101 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
All calls to 101 cost a flat-rate of 15p irrespective of whether phoning from a landline, mobile or duration of call.
101 is much easier to remember than the old 0845 number.
In a Police emergency people should still dial 9999
Ever wanted to play a musical instrument? Put off by not being able to read music?
A new group based on “listen and copy” is being started up at Keighley Temple Row Centre. For complete novices and musicians, at all levels, with a choice of instruments.
Call ‘Temple’ Row on Keighley 01535 606700 for details.
Do you wonder what to do with all those 1p, 2p and 5p coins that gather in your pockets and purses? Why not put them to good use, with a Loose Change Box. You can hand the coins in your box to the office, or we will visit your home to empty it for you. You do not have to count it, we do that. You will not be required to pay it into a bank and write a cheque, as The Royal National Institute of Blind People requires you to do with their home boxes. From 1st April 2011 to 31st December 2011 donations amounting to £670.97 were received to support our services. In May each year we will send you a certificate telling you how much you have raised throughout the year. We would like to pass our 2010/2011 total of £893.35 so please let us have your collection before 31st of March.
Anyone who would be interested in taking a Loose Change Box please call the Helpline
These are national entitlements irrespective of whether you live in local authorities covering Bradford, Lancashire or North Yorkshire.
For more information on these entitlements please contact our helpline.
1 Albert Street Keighley, BD21 2AT, Telephone Helpline Keighley (01535) 602354
These are the opening hours for the office, only. For the daily living shop hours please refer to that section.
We at sight airedale greatly appreciate the time and support our volunteers give us and we are always interested in hearing from anyone wanting to join our volunteer team.
If you would like to volunteer please contact the helpline.
Chat, Musical Entertainment, Guest Speakers, Refreshments and Outings.
For a calendar of social centre events visit our website, www.sightairedale.org.uk
Meetings first and third Wednesday afternoon. 1.30 p.m. to 3.30 p.m, St. Wilfrid's Church Hall, Gilstead. Transport can be requested. Contact : Robert Nicholson, Centre Organiser. Telephone : the helpline for the phone number
Meetings first Tuesday afternoon each month. 1.30 p.m. To 3.30 p.m. Anchor Housing, Townend Close, Cross Hills. Transport can be requested. Contact: Kevin Baldwin, Acting Centre Organiser. Telephone: The Helpline.
Meetings first and third Thursday afternoon. 1.30 p.m. to 3.30 p.m. Lena Anderton Meeting Room, 31 Scott Street, Keighley Transport can be requested. Contact: Kevin Baldwin, Acting Centre Organiser Telephone: The Helpline
Meetings second and fourth Tuesday afternoon 1.30 p.m. to 3.15 p.m Soroptimist Rooms , 28 Otley Street, Skipton. Transport can be requested. Contact May Howard, Centre Organiser Telephone (01756) 795342
Meetings last Monday afternoon each month 1.30 p.m. to 3.30 p.m. Lena Anderton Meeting Room, 31 Scott Street, Keighley. Transport can be requested. Contact Kevin Baldwin, Acting Centre Organiser Telephone The Helpline
Meetings first Thursday morning each month, 10.30 a.m to 12 Noon at the Clarke Foley Centre. Transport can be arranged Contact Elizabeth Hughes, Centre Organiser Telephone The Helpline
Meetings fortnightly Thursday afternoon 2pm to 3.30pm, Burley Methodist Church. Transport can be requested for Burley and Menston residents.Contact : Jennifer Whalley Group Organiser Telephone (01943) 864493
The Sight Centre, 31 Scott Street Keighley
We are agents for suppliers of equipment such as: RNIB, Cobolt Systems, Dolphin Computer Access, Optelec, Eschenbach, Optima Low Vision Services and BT. To arrange a one-to-one hour appointment with a staff member please contact the helpline. If unable to travel to our shop our mobile display on selected ranges is offered according to a needs assessment.
Contact: Duty Officer (am only) Telephone: Bradford (01274) 435001.
Health and Sensory Impairment Team, Craven Area
Contact: Gary Edmunds Rehabilitation Officer (Mon,Tue, Wed) Telephone: Northallerton (01609) 533583
Adult and Community Services, Sensory Impairment (East Zone) Burnley.
AudioFact - Here are some useful local and national contacts of audio news and leisure