Accessible Technology Demos Featured at APT-COAT Brown Bag Lunch
June 18, 2008
On June 18th Karen Peltz Strauss, Co-Chair of the Coalition of Organizations for Accessible Technology (COAT) and a member of the APT Board of Directors moderated a thought-provoking discussion with industry and consumer perspectives. The occasion was a brown bag lunch co-sponsored by APT and COAT around the theme Digital Communication in the 21st Century: Ensuring Access by People with Disabilities.
APT Board member Larry Goldberg, who directs the National Center for Accessible Media at WGBH, provided demonstrations of Internet captioning, accessible user interfaces and video descriptive services. Captions are a textual equivalent of the dialogue and (significant) sound effects or non-dialogue audio. Video Description is a system which provides audio descriptions and narrations of key elements in video programming, television programming, television set-ups, or movie access.
The discussion that followed provided an overview of accessibility issues and draft legislation designed to address those issues by Jenifer Simpson of the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD) and the APT Board. Lisa Hamlin of the Hearing Loss Association of America and Mark Reichert of the American Foundation for the Blind described the barriers and the opportunities created by digital communication for their communities as well as the impact on their own lives. The panel concluded with Jeff Kramer of Verizon, who added the industry perspective and highlighted the progress being made with companies and advocates working together to solve differences.
As always, the luncheon brought together a broad cross section of interests from government, industry and the public interest, including Mark Seifert, staff to Representative Dingell (D-MI) who announced that H.R. 6320, the "Twenty-first Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2008," would be introduced the next day. The bill is co-sponsored by Representative Ed Markey (D-MA) and Representative Heather Wilson (R-NM).
