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NCAM is a research and development facility here at WGBH that works on access to media
for people with disabilities. We were established 19 years ago, so we’re coming up on our
20th anniversary and we grew out of WGBH’s long history of making media accessible to
people, originally, to people who are deaf or hard of hearing. That was our caption center.
Then we added Descriptive Video Service in 1990 and then in 93 we realized there was
a lot of R&D projects, research software development projects that would really be helped by having
a unit that would do that. So that’s when we established, with help from the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting this R&D unit called NCAM.
The beginning was 72 when Julia Child’s French Chef was first captioned. So, that
goes way back. Was I in high school? It was a long time ago. I did not do that. That was
open captioning, at the time it was the only way you could caption stuff, with burned in
subtitles. Andthat’s throughout the 1970s how we captioned TV and WGBH had a department
and that’s how it started.
So Julia was captioned and then they captioned ABC evening news which was a rebroadcast of
ABC’s news with subtitles on the PBS network. So, it would air at 6:30 on ABC and this department
here would quickly recaption it, or caption it, for 11:00pm feed on the PBS network.
When we did our first project almost 20 years ago, I think, about 18 years ago, web accessibility,
was new to everybody and we began evaluating websites and we began working with PBS stations,
actually, they were our first web accessibility project, about designing basic accessibility
into websites. And at the time, you know, nobody knew what it was, nobody knew what
to do, hardly anybody had used or heard of a screen reader and it took a good decade
for us to, us meaning the industry, NCAM as well as others in the industry, to really
begin to make developers aware and to educate them about basic things to do for accessibility.
I would say it took at least 10 years to make basic accessibility techniques a part of a
developer’s vocabulary.
I think accessibility is definitely got a higher profile now in the development communities
now, hardware and software both, but the level of activity has been ratcheted up, and decentralized,
you know. With the app store and the Android and Google Play there’s just so much more
to keep up with.
Inaccessible web sites are the product of ignorance. Not in a mean way; nobody designs
a website to be inaccessible on purpose. It’s just that still a lot of people don’t know
basic accessibility techniques.
First and foremost we work with the disabled community. We listen to what their concerns
are. Originally, when the iPhone came out, it was really very exciting to the mainstream
population; the blind community was very upset. And so we, that that rose to the top of the
list of issues that we would hope to be able to deal with. Luckily, we had a relationship
with Apple, so we could work with them on finding ways to make the iPhone accessible
and, amazingly enough, it’s the most popular phone with the blind community now because
of the work that Apple did to build accessibility in.
On the one hand you’ve got things like the iPhone and the iPad which are, they’re nicely
accessible. I know of several blind contacts or colleagues that several years ago were
struggling with symbian phones, OS phones, that switched to iOS devices and are much
happier because Apple really did do a good job designing VoiceOver into the devices and
creating a way to command a glass screen with a screen reader. But, a lot of other devices
have a long way to go, which is not to say that iOS devices are finished. They’re not,
but they’re in pretty good shape. But, yeah, mobile devices are a challenge. More and more
people are selling and buying mobile devices and more and more materials are being designed
for these things. Not just websites, but ebooks and other electronic publications.
We’ve actually seen an example of that with this new law that takes effect in just a few
weeks, the Communications and Video Accessibility Act for internet captioning, and for instance,
take a tablet, whether it’s an iPad or not, for captions to work from a website that is
streaming video, in text of some form, on a player on their device, everyone’s got
to hold hands there. It’s starts with the content provider, say it’s PBS, and PBS
is streaming an episode of Masterpiece Theater, the video has to be encoded properly or tied
to streaming captions. The player has to look for them. The hardware has to be able to decode
them and the law actually says everyone must play nicely.
Anyone who is regulated by the FCC rules for internet captioning, and that’s just programming
that was originally captioned on TV. So, Masterpiece airs with captions, it goes on the website,
it has to have captions. If you’re a web original program, if you’ve never been broadcast
with captions, you’re not covered. So, whenever you want, you can provide the controls over
look and feel but you’re not a regulated entity. But, like a Netflix, which is streaming
a lot of TV shows, yeah definitely. Hulu, iTunes, yeah, all covered.
Netflix has been working pretty hard to up the level of captions they provide and it’s
pretty impressive cause you can now watch captions on your iPhone, on your Netflix app
and they enabled that, I think, six months ago. So that’s pretty cool looking. They,
as far as I know, will make the deadline, the requirement.
It’s a piece of cake to stick a video into a web page now and it will soon be just as
easy to put captions into the same web pages and associate them with the video. So you’ve
got a video element and now there’s an element called Track, and the Track element sits as
a child below the video, and, just like the video element points to a piece of video,
the Track element points to a text track of some kind. Captions, subtitles, even text
audio descriptions. So instead of audio descriptions as human recorded narrated track, well now
you can send, you’ll be able to send audio descriptions as a text track, which won’t
be visible, but which the screen reader will see, essentially, and read out loud.
There’s a lot of work left to go, but there are lot of good things that are already beginning
to appear that will make a difference.