[gui-talk] Time Warner Cable Nightmare

[Gerald Levy]

I'm already paying almost $120 a month for Time Warner cable service for the privilege of receiving 500 channels, 99% of which I have no interest in just to be able to receive the few that do interest me.  It has taken me years to figure out which channel numbers corresponded to my favorite channels.  I spend a lot of time listening to the Music Choice channels, so imagine my surprise when I tuned to TWC channel 629  this morning, which used to be the solid gold oldies channel , to discover that it was now some other channel.  And to my horror, all the other Music Choice channels, which used to be carried on channels 601-647 were also apparently gone.  Fuming, I called Time Warner customer support, always an exercise in aggravation, and after waiting 20 minutes, finally got a customer service agent who explained to me that Time Warner had changed its channel lineup, and that my beloved Music Choice channels were now located from channel 1901 to 1950.  I explained to the agent that I was blind and that the only way I could determine where all my favorite channels were located would be to visit their web site and use the Find function of my screen reader to locate each channel by number and its corresponding musical genre.  But Time Warner has not bothered to update its wb site , so when you visit it, you get the old channel lineup , which is completely different from the new one.  And because the onscreen channel guide displayed by the cable box is totally inaccessible, there is no way to get correct channel information this way.  And the channel lineups on NFB Newsline have not been updated in years to reflect the current Time Warner lineup.  What an outrageous nightmare!  After telling me that she had no idea when or if the Time Warner web site would be updated to reflect the new channel lineup, I asked the agent when Time Warner would be offering accessible set-top boxes, but after she asked me to hold so that she could speak to her supervisor, she came back on the line and told me that she had no idea when such boxes would be available.  I asked her whether Time Warner was even working on an accessible box and again, she told me that she had no idea.  If I could get decent reception with an antennaa, I would ditch Time Warner altogether, but here in Manhattan, reception with an indoor antenna is difficult to impossible.  Time Warner really has its customers by the gonads,and things are only going to get worse if their merger with Comcast is approved by the FCC.  Do any other Time Warner cable customers on this list have any tips for locating specific channels of interest without sighted help?  Or must I scroll through all the channels on my cable box just to find the few that I'm interested in?  What a freakin' mess!

Gerald