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.
Create lessons and assign videos to managed Student Accounts.
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.
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.
At the PAC3 at JALT Conference (2001), Gordon Liversidge discusses research showing that the presence of captioning aids comprehension and/or acquisition. However, most studies do not consider the link between viewing and activities. The first section explains the regional and disciplinary fragmentation of closed captioning research. The second section introduces comprehensive studies each of which contain a number of experiments. The third section presents smaller experiments that examine specific questions.
Science programs on television present much of their information only visually. For people who are visually impaired this reliance on visual cues limits access to the learning and enjoyment such programs offer. Emilie Schmeidler discusses the intent to provide visually impaired people with more access to the programs' content and to make viewing more satisfying by ensuring that people with disabilities have the same access to information and opportunities that people without disabilities do.
Joel Snyder tells us that Audio Description (AD) provides a verbal version of the visual for the benefit of people who are blind or have low vision. Succinct descriptions precisely timed to occur only during the pauses in dialogue or significant sound elements of performing arts or in media allow persons with vision impairments to have greater access to the images integral to a given work of art. Mr. Snyder provides a brief summary of the history of description and then overviews how creating description is an art, the venues for description, skills required of a professional describer, and why description is important to literacy.
How can a blind or visually impaired person enjoy the theatre? Or movies, television, and other audiovisual productions? How can visual experiences effectively be made verbal? Gregory Frazier, founder of AudioVision, was a key figure in the early development of audio description for persons with a visual impairment. Watch this historical treasure, introduced by Margaret Hardy, and learn from Emmy Award winner Frazier, a pioneer in the field.
This listing was prepared from information provided by various description-related sources and from surveys conducted by the DCMP. While the DCMP has attempted to identify all service vendors, it apologizes for any omissions. As additional service vendors are identified, they will be included in this list. Listing of a service vendor does not constitute an endorsement by the U.S. Department of Education, the National Association of the Deaf, or the DCMP.
Working with sound as a producer, audio engineer, or voice-over artist seems like a natural fit for a professional who has vision loss.
Years ago, my wife, Esther Geiger, was driving some children to a drama class, and the kids were chattering excitedly about the movie "Toys." It takes place in a toy factory, and the film is filled with colorful images and movement gags—but not a lot of dialogue. One child in the car, who was blind, said, "Oh, I saw that. It was the most boring movie I've ever been to!" Indeed, this was well before the advent of audio description for film.
Looking around the classroom, Sarah wondered how she would meet the diverse needs of her students in teaching History. After reading their school records and talking with other teachers, she knew that four students came from families where English was a second language, but that many more lacked the background knowledge and vocabulary needed to comprehend her content; three students in the class had moderate to profound hearing loss; and one student had little vision.
Integrating described and captioned media into differentiated instruction.
Joanna Scavo, Aberdeen Broadcast Services, provides information for parents and teachers about the 2012 FCC rules for video description and captioning.
Discusses confusing research on kids' screen time
The need for inclusive learning for students with disabilities.
As educators, we are driven by local, state, and national mandates, but we really only have one goal: to be an effective teacher that positively impacts student learning. Then comes the question: How do we accomplish our goal? Well from an instructional standpoint, we develop our unit plans, curriculum maps, weekly and daily lessons, and do not forget the reading of the curriculum or standard course of study all while keeping instruction innovative in order to maintain student interest. We become deliberate and intentional about our approach to teaching through the integrated use of technology and media.
Joyce Adams, National Captioning Institute, provides additional information about the important question of color.
Emily Bell, Multimedia Manager at CaptionMax, gathered feedback from teachers who have used described educational videos in the classroom. In this short video clip, she provides six tips for getting the most from the programming. Ms. Bell presented these tips in the January 2012 VDRDC webinar "Bringing Video Description Into the 21st Century."
