Families and school personnel (including those in training) who have at least one student with a disability can sign up for free membership.
Standards-aligned videos with high-quality captions and audio description.
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Educator and sign language training videos for school personnel and families.
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DCMP's Learning Center provides hundreds of articles on topics such as remote learning, transition, blindness, ASL, topic playlists, and topics for parents.
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DCMP offers the only guidelines developed for captioning and describing educational media, used worldwide.
Learn how to apply for membership, find and view accessible media, and use DCMP’s teaching tools.
DCMP offers several online courses, including many that offer RID and ACVREP credit. Courses for students are also available.
Asynchronous, online classes for professionals working with students who are deaf, hard of hearing, blind, low vision, or deaf-blind.
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For interpreters, audio describers, parents, and educators working with students who are hard of hearing, low vision, and deaf-blind.
Modules are self-paced, online trainings designed for professionals, open to eLearners and full members.
These self-paced, online learning modules cover the topics of transition, note-taking, and learning about audio description.
DCMP can add captions, audio description, and sign language interpretation to your educational videos and E/I programming.
Captions are essential for viewers who are deaf and hard of hearing, and audio description makes visual content accessible for the blind and visually impaired.
DCMP can ensure that your content is always accessible and always available to children with disabilities through our secure streaming platforms.
DCMP partners with top creators and distributors of educational content. Take a look
The DCMP provides services designed to support and improve the academic achievement of students with disabilities. We partner with top educational and television content creators and distributors to make media accessible and available to these students.
The American Foundation for the Blind and the American Council of the Blind overview the SAP (Secondary Audio Program) channel.
In a paper written in 2010, Michele Viana Minucci and Maria Silvia Cárnio evaluate the skills involved in reading movie subtitles of second and fourth graders of students at a public school. Considering the skills and the subtitles reading level, fourth graders presented a significant better performance when compared to the second graders. Fourth graders presented skills related to the levels of literal comprehension and independent comprehension, whereas second graders where mostly at the decoding level. In conclusion: second graders are at the textual decoding level of movie subtitles, while fourth graders are at the literal comprehension level of movie subtitles. This indicates that schooling has an influence on the reading of movie subtitles.
This thesis investigates the impact of conventional and alternative styles of audio description on the blind and low viewers' comprehension, entertainment experience, trustworthiness of the audio description narrative, and style preference. Author John Riccio asked 18 blind and low vision participants to watch three episodes of the television show Odd Job Jack in a single audio description style. Each participant was asked to complete a pre and post study questionnaire, and a post episode questionnaire at the completion of each episode. Results indicated that the alternative style of audio description provided better understanding, entertainment value, and is more trustworthy.
The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of using Spanish captions, English captions, or no captions with a Spanish language soundtrack on the comprehension of intermediate students in a university-level "Spanish as a Foreign Language" class. Concludes with a discussion of the pedagogical implications of using multilingual captions in a variety of ways to enhance second language listening and reading comprehension. By Paul Markham and Lizette Peter, University of Kansas, 2002.
In her paper about audio description (AD), Sabine Braun outlines a discourse-based approach to AD focusing on the role of mental modeling, local and global coherence, and different types of inferences. Applying these concepts to AD, she discusses initial insights and outlines questions for empirical research, with an aim to showing that a discourse-based approach to AD can provide an informed framework for research, training and practice.
A study by Maija Hirvonen, University of Helsinki, Finland, in 2012. Analyses how shot distance is reflected in audio description by syntactic and semantic means. Four different-language audio descriptions of two films were utlilized, contrasting the visual source text with the verbal translation. The study aims to show how audio description can make use of diverse representational strategies and linguistic devices in rendering shot distance. These strategies and devices could be used purposely to compensate for visual cues so as to give an idea of space similar to that conveyed by the visual representation.
Information from the FCC regarding video description which is “audio-narrated descriptions of a television program’s key visual elements. These descriptions are inserted into natural pauses in the program’s dialogue. Video description makes TV programming more accessible to individuals who are blind or visually impaired.” On August 25, 2011, the FCC adopted rules to implement the video description provisions of the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010 (CVAA). These rules are effective as of July 1, 2012.
IBM Research Tokyo partnered with the National Center for Accessible Media at WGBH to research ways to deliver online descriptions via text-to-speech (TTS) methods, rather than using human recordings. IBM and NCAM explored two approaches which exploit HTML5 media elements—video, audio, and track—as well as Javascript.
Comparison of description guidelines by six different countries: Spain, Germany, France, United Kingdom, Greece, and America. Though, in principal the guidelines and/or standards are very similar in nature, there are minor differences in a few of the recommendations. These differences could potentially be because of different formats of film/television programming being produced in different countries, different ways of watching films/television programs, cultural differences leading to relative levels of understanding of set-ups specific to different films/television programs, and also different ways in which audio description is made available i.e. through products specifically targeted at blind or partially sighted people or as an alternative sound track via mainstream services. Royal National Institute of Blind People, 2010.
The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of using Spanish captions, English captions, or no captions with a Spanish language soundtrack on intermediate university-level Spanish as a Foreign Language students' listening/reading comprehension. These findings indicate that intermediate-level foreign language students' listening comprehension/reading comprehension can be substantially enhanced via the use of captions in English or Spanish
These 2011 guidelines were created to guide Pearson's development teams and are updated regularly with new techniques. Make educational Web media accessible to people with disabilities. Explains how to: 1) meet the international Web content accessibility guidelines from the World Wide Web Consortium, specifically Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Version 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) at Level AA and 2) meet current U.S. Government Section 508 Standards, specifically § 1194.22 Web-based Intranet and Internet information and applications.
A PowerPoint report of the European Erasmus Multilateral Lifelong Learning project's goals to: 1) Create authoritative guidelines and/or proposals for the AD profession/industry in all Europe; 2) Develop curricula for universities in Europe: both for entertainment and for instruction; 3) Train audio describers and audio describer trainers; 4) Sensitize and influence decision-makers; 5) Create useful connections with the television industry and with the service providers. By Chris Taylor, 2013.
In the Netherlands, as in most other European countries, closed captions for the deaf summarize texts rather than render them verbatim. Caption editors argue that this way television viewers have enough time to both read the text and watch the program. They also claim that the meaning of the original message is properly conveyed. However, many deaf people demand verbatim subtitles so that they have full access to all original information. They claim that vital information is withheld from them as a result of the summarizing process. Linguistic research was conducted in order to: (a) identify the type of information that is left out of captioned texts and (b) determine the effects of nonverbatim captioning on the meaning of the text. The differences between spoken and captioned texts were analyzed on the basis of on a model of coherence relations in discourse. One prominent finding is that summarizing affects coherence relations, making them less explicit and altering the implied meaning.
This collaborative report, prepared by Blind Citizens Australia, Vision Australia, ACCAN, and Media Access Australia, aims to highlight the consumer experience of the audio description (AD) technical trial on ABC TV in order to persuade the Australian government to support a permanent AD service. Attempts to reflect the high demand for AD by consumers and outline the benefits of AD.
This work proposes a promising multimodal approach to sensory substitution for movies by providing complementary information through haptics, pertaining to the positions and movements of actors, in addition to a film's audio description and audio content. In a ten-minute presentation of five movie clips to ten individuals who were visually impaired or blind, the novel methodology was found to provide an almost two time increase in the perception of actors' movements in scenes. Moreover, participants appreciated and found useful the overall concept of providing a visual perspective to film through haptics. A thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree master of science at Arizona State University by Lakshmie Narayan Viswanathan in 2011.