March 8, 2007 | Read Time: 2 minutes
The migration of television programs, movies, and other video content to the Internet marks the newest challenge to a nonprofit organization that has worked for more than three decades to make broadcast media accessible to people with disabilities.
Thirty-five years ago, WGBH, the public-broadcasting organization in Boston, introduced television captioning with an episode of its cooking series, The French Chef, with Julia Child.
Later the broadcasting group developed Descriptive Video Service, which provides blind viewers with an audio narration of a television program’s or movie’s visual elements.
Now WGBH — through its Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family National Center for Accessible Media — has created CaptionKeeper, a software program that converts traditional closed-caption data for Internet use.
When a program is digitized for broadcast on the Internet, the captioning that was legally required for its television broadcast is lost, explains Larry Goldberg, director of media access at WGBH.
“It seems like something that should be as easy as pie and just transfers over,” he says, “but in fact, it doesn’t.”
The CaptionKeeper technology, which has been available for about a year, has been adopted by America Online, universities, and government entities, and some commercial broadcasters are thinking about using it.
“As new media is developed, I’d say we are playing catch-up every day,” Mr. Goldberg says. “There’s awareness at the major companies that are putting out new technology. But they’re also running so fast to put new product out there.”
To help cover that gap, the Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family Foundations in December awarded WGBH a $1-million grant over six years.
Mr. Goldberg says the money will help the organization start initial research and work on making new technologies accessible as they are introduced — rather than having to wait until WGBH can secure new grants to pay for the project.
That way, says Mr. Goldberg, “we can try to get ahead of the curve a little bit better.”
For more information: Go to http://ncam.wgbh.org.
