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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.
Find resources for providing equal access in the classroom, making media accessible, and maximizing your use of DCMP's free services.
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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.
Topics for this 90-minute webinar include: 1) An update of the activities of the VDRDC; 2) The "Dos and Don'ts" of description; 3) Live demonstrations of two FREE software programs which can be used to add description to media; and 4) An overview of resources for obtaining described materials for use in the classroom.
A lesson plan from ReadWriteThink about using description to improve students' written communication skills. This plan focuses on utilization of Disney's popular The Lion King, but teachers can broaden their approach to this lesson by utilizing any one of the hundreds of accessible titles available from the DCMP collection.
This short document was drafted by the Audio Description International (ADI) Guidelines committee in 2003 and serves as a useful reference of guidelines for audio describers. The Audio Description Project, formerly the ADI, an initiative of the American Council of the Blind, makes these guidelines available.
This video segment is taken from the interactive VDRDC/DCMP webinar, "Do It Yourself," Educational Description: Guidelines and Tools. This segment features a presentation by Rick Boggs from The Accessible Planet (TAP). Rick offers guidelines on how to provide video description for the blind or visually impaired.
This an archive video of the Video Description Research and Development Center webinar #3 - YouDescribe – How You Can Add Audio Description to Any YouTube Video!. The webinar occurred May 30, 2013. Learn about YouDescribe, the exciting new tool developed by the Video Description Research and Development Center (VDRDC). YouDescribe is a free tool that anyone can use to add description to YouTube videos. YouDescribe includes everything needed to create description; all you need to provide is a microphone. In addition, YouDescribe has a free embeddable player which can be used to include described videos on your own site.
The American Foundation for the Blind and the American Council of the Blind overview the SAP (Secondary Audio Program) channel.
Education manager and Itinerant Teacher of the Deaf, Anne McGrath (Media Access Australia, 2013), talks through key pieces of research which identify the link between captions and literacy. Videos and multimedia are being used more and more in the classroom – a trend the new Australian curriculum certainly encourages. Using video not only allows for variety and engagement, but for a real benefit for students' literacy: captions. Similar to foreign language subtitles, captions are the text version of audio, including speech, sounds, and music. Captions are essential for students who are deaf or hearing impaired and also have immense benefits for students learning an additional language, struggling readers, and visual learners.
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.
