Well, once upon a time I started noticing people speaking regional dialects 'translated' into standard Japanese. I think they do serve the utility of making things a little easier to understand, at least in some cases.
News story was probably a bad example, but how about say blind people using Japanese braille which appears to be completely phonetic? Or how about the fact that furigana are often printed to aid people (e.g children) in determining how to read the Kanji, even for standard Kanji? Certainly Kanji can help after you know them but is it actually necessary?
I don't disagree with those examples, and I can't pretend to sympathize with a blind Japanese person reading Braille, for example.
I do think that Japanese is an extremely complex language, and ability to recognize characters and vocabulary are closely intertwined. Kanji is entrenched, but is it necessary? Probably not strictly speaking.
