In the last decade low bit rate speech coding research has received much attention resulting in newly developed good quality speech coders operating at as low as 4-8 kb/s. Although speech quality at around 8 kb/s is acceptable for a wide variety of telephony applications, more improvements in quality are necessary to make it acceptable to broadcast-type applications. In addition to the required low bit rate with acceptable speech quality, very low complexity decoders are necessary to provide a cost effective and compact solution. In this paper we describe a CELP speech coder to be used in audio description of television (AUDETEL). The quality of CELP coded speech has been improved significantly by a new codebook implementation which also simplifies the encoder/decoder complexity.