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Standards-aligned videos with high-quality captions and audio description.
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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.
Filtering by tag: description
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."
In June 2008 a survey was conducted of the top 35 educational media producers/distributors in the United States. Each company was asked about its products and whether they were accessible, either via captioning or description (or if both were available), whether they were familiar with either accessibility option, and how many of their customers requested either or both on the media items they intended to purchase.
The Audio Description Tip Sheet is intended as a quick reference for describers. View the DCMP Description Key for a comprehensive and accessible reference for audio description.
Kelly Warren, owner of Mind’s Eye Audio Productions, overviews the process of describing television, film, and video. She defines good description, discusses its complexities, and looks into its future.
In May 2011, the Texas Education of Blind and Visually Impaired Students Advisory Committee offered teachers, parents, and students with visual impairments across the United States and Canada an opportunity to submit a short video on the theme, "Social Skills: Putting the ‘C’ in Cool." The contest provided a perfect opportunity to highlight a favorite lesson to teach social skills at home, school, or in the community.
Imagine that you are a blind, fourth-grade girl and that your class is watching a film that examines prejudice and bullying in our culture. The film is a drama, where young girls shoot scornful glares, roll their eyes, and whisper about a new student. Instead of aggressive bullying, they get up and leave when the new girl approaches. Now imagine that you're studying human anatomy in high school. The brilliantly colored graphics of today's film show how blood flows through the heart's ventricles and oxygen inflates the bronchioles in the lungs.
Debbie Risk discusses the Captioning Key and Description Key as valuable resources to guide companies in their work of adding captioning and description to videos and other media.
In an address on March 15, 2011, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) Secretary Duncan stated: "In order to win the future, as President Obama has challenged us, we must enable every single American to reach their potential, and in my book, all means all. Every child, regardless of income, race, background, or disability can learn and must learn."
If you're the movie-watching type, you know that you get to enjoy great films the way they were meant to be enjoyed: on the big screen. Watching a movie in a theater allows you to enjoy technically illustrative audio and be mesmerized by bigger-than-life visuals. It allows you to fully empathize with the characters, lose yourself in the dialogue, and fully engage with and follow the plot. But what if you couldn't see? You couldn't be mesmerized by these visuals. You wouldn't be able to empathize with the characters as well if you couldn't decipher what they looked like, especially if a character has a particularly important feature used to identify and differentiate him/her from others. Could you differentiate between voices? Would you be able to follow the plot as well as if you had sight?
For 12 million Americans who are blind or visually impaired, 1990 marked a new era promising fuller access to television programming through an innovative service called Descriptive Video developed by Boston public broadcaster, WGBH. This report, written and disseminated by WGBH, overviews the benefits of description and parallels those benefits with those of captioning. For example, the author notes, "Descriptions can also be useful when a viewer is doing several things at once, needs to attend to something, or leaves the room during a program. While these uses are not the original intent of the service, they need to be taken into account when considering the potential audience for and potential benefits of video description." It stands to reason that description can benefit everyone.
While some research has been conducted about the benefits of description and blind adults, no empirical data have been collected relating to benefits of description for children. In this paper by Melanie Peskoe, literature has been reviewed to discuss (1) the emerging trend toward educational programming for preschool-aged children, (2) the various theories about how children learn, and (3) the implications of description for both blind and sighted children. This paper serves as a foundation for future, needed research on this topic and calls for attention to be paid to both the social impact of description as well as the methods used for deciding when, what, and how to describe.
Thank you for visiting our special commemorative “Golden Anniversary” section. We hope that you will explore, along with us, the DCMP’s rich history in educational media accessibility. Here you will find a brief but informative article chronicling the program’s history up to 2008, a detailed timeline highlighting the first fifty years of captioning and description, and a list of some of our favorite DCMP history-related articles from our Clearinghouse section.
Access to audiovisual materials should be as open and free as access to print-based materials. However, we have not yet achieved such a reality. Methods useful for organizing print-based materials do not necessarily work well when applied to audiovisual and multimedia materials. In this project, Canadian researchers James Turner and Suzanne Mathieu studied using audio description text and written descriptions to generate keywords for indexing moving images. In the second part of the study, they looked at the possibility of automatically translating keywords from audio description text into other languages to use them as indexing, with encouraging results.
Philip J. Piety's study investigates the language used in a selection of films containing audio description and develops a set of definitions that allow productions containing it to be more fully defined, measured, and compared. It also highlights some challenging questions related to audio description as a discursive practice and provides a basis for future study of this unique use of language. From the Journal of Visual Impairments and Blindness (JVIB).
Larry Goldberg, the Director of Media Access for WGBH in Boston, delivers a testimony to Congressional members of the ''Twenty-first Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2007'' subcommittee regarding the efforts undertaken by WGBH and NCAM to ensure accessibility in the digital age. Topics covered include the following: a brief history of captioning and audio description, some of the accessibility challenges faced by producers in moving their content to the Internet, the development and goals of the Internet Captioning Forum, and the need for standardization of captioning formats for the Web.
