SALT LAKE CITY — Some of the most loyal and thorough readers of Utah's daily newspapers have never seen one.
"That's how we've kept up on the little things in the community that might not make the television news and other radio programs," said Leslie Gertsch, volunteer executive director of the Utah Council of the Blind — who is blind herself.
"We are very interested in the community like everybody else — maybe more — and a lot of people keep up with the obituaries and the ads and sales and comics, and a lot of the fine-print side of things other news sources don't provide."
The service they use was started to let people keep in touch with everything in the paper, "so they read pretty much everything in the paper," she said.
But all of the news she and other visually impaired Utahns receive via ink on paper — even when it's read to them — will be a little harder to track starting later this month, when the state library takes the 34-year-old reading service off the air.
A combination of budget cuts and a high-tech, phone-based service with computer-generated voices is being started in its stead, but a few listeners attending a weekend statewide conference for the blind said the change would make them feel a little less connected to the outside world.
Some of the programming will remain intact, but the LDS Church News weekly and other magazines won't be provided, and gone will be many of the ads or announcements or deep local happenings that listeners say maybe aren't necessarily newsworthy, but were a real point of contact.
"Not everything faster and virtual is better," said Tara Briggs, 27, who said the service was a connection that is being seen as too old-school.
It is a real service to people who tend to be way outside of the mainstream anyway, said Cindy Vega, president of the Utah Council of the Blind. Even though it's a technological step forward, "it kind of feels like a step back on a human level," she said.
The reading service, with an annual budget of more than $100,000, was trimmed as part of a larger cut of $235,000 imposed on state government programs approved by the Legislature last month.
But Gertsch said that doesn't seem like much of a financial gain for the loss it will be to the quality of life of people who are among the most marginalized citizens in the state.
"These are people who get to take a lot of knocks and setbacks and barriers every day just getting around," she said, noting that it was part of feeling at home when you get home.
Just because a service seems mundane to government, or amounts to one of the smallest expenditures the state makes, shouldn't make it easier to cut. That should actually make it harder, a group of disabled Utahns agreed as they waited outside the budget committee room during the session.
Anything that keeps people active and participating in life is good, they said. And the better it is for the quality of life for them, the better it is for quality of life for the state.
"Plus, it's just the right thing to do," said one woman, who declined to give her name.
Gertsch and other advocates say the program was first started by civic groups, and they hold a slim hope that some benefactor might find a way to keep the reader service on the air.
e-mail: jthalman@desnews.com