TECHNOS—Donna Horn, VP of Business Development for CaptionMax

July 27, 2008

Donna Horn, VP of Business Development for CaptionMax

The Agency for Instructional Technology recently partnered with CaptionMax to provide closed captioning and video descriptions for AIT instructional and professional development products, which will make it easier for sight- and hearing-impaired students and teachers to utilize and enjoy those products. This project is being funded by a five-year U.S. Department of Education Access to Emerging Technologies grant that was awarded to CaptionMax. The cooperative agreement between DoE and CaptionMax will dramatically increase the amount of accessible media to blind, visually impaired, deaf, and hard-of-hearing students. Adding AIT to the mix will have a tremendous impact on the number of educational products that will become available. Too often, Internet streaming, much of what is contained on DVDs, and other curriculum-based media, are inaccessible to students with disabilities. This partnership will change all that. In the first year of the grant, CaptionMax will create access services for AIT’s DVD/DVD-ROM products, such as: closed captions, subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing, audio descriptions, transcripts of captions and audio descriptions, spoken menus, and tagged .pdfs of teacher guides in which graphics and/or symbols will be described. Technos spoke with Donna Horn, vice president of business development for CaptionMax about this innovative endeavor.

Technos: Can you give us a brief explanation of what CaptionMax provides for media?

D.H.: CaptionMax is a company interested in accessibility. We started out with providing closed captioning on television and cable programs as well as educational materials, industrial training materials, conferences, and that sort of thing. And that’s really been our bread and butter—providing access technologies. We had moved from providing services to deaf and blind people to also providing services such as audio description.

What, exactly, is audio description?

“Audio description” is a generic term, also known as DVI or DVS—Descriptive Video Services, or voicing descriptions. We create a script describing a program’s critical visual content and then narrate the descriptions to fit in between the dialog and other sound effects. We then mix that voice track into the original audio of the program. If the program is broadcast, the viewer at home would need to have the SAP on their TV sets turned on. And we’ve continued to expand. Captioning led us to do subtitling, for instance. We realized there was a tremendous need for Spanish subtitling, to make programming accessible not just for deaf Spanish people, but also for hearing Spanish people. In fact, today we provide multilingual captioning and subtitling for DVD, home video, and other formats. So, our access service, which started as just captioning, has grown into all of these things, including ESL (English as a Second Language) service.

I suppose there would be a market for other languages?

Just think of the possibilities! Now, with DVD technology, there is so much “digital space” available that you could put all kinds of information on a disk.

How does AIT programming fit in?

It’s fantastic, the products that AIT provides. We have worked with AIT in the past on captioning due to a previous grant, and as long as the old grant was in effect, those projects had to have some distribution over TV or cable, on PBS, and had to be suitable for classroom use. So, with AIT’s programs strictly targeted for educational use, it was exactly what we’d hoped for at that point. Now, with new technologies like DVDs and Internet streaming, we find our new partnership with AIT works again.

What are “enhanced accessibility components”?

We have a new grant from the U.S. Department of Education to provide enhanced access services for emerging technologies. Basically, we’ll continue to provide captioning and audio description, but we’ll add descriptions for the navigational systems of DVDs — in other words, a voice menu; an actual voice (not a computerized one) will read the menu on the DVD. So, if a blind person, for instance, uses an instructional DVD from AIT, that student will be able to hear the menu items…whereas a deaf student can still see them. So, both students can navigate the menu and utilize the DVD to its fullest extent. It sounds like a very simple thing, but it’s essential.

Other enhancements that we’re looking at are to have easy reader captions, for younger age groups who are just learning to read, or for slower readers who need a bit more help. In this case, the easy reader will break down sentences with key words, and that becomes a tool in learning to read, helping to recall information through the use of captions. In addition to this service, we’re looking to attach a glossary for young readers and deaf or hard-of-hearing students. This glossary would link to captions elsewhere on the DVD to provide context. You and I, as hearing people, hear and acquire vocabulary every day. But for people who are born deaf, they’re not hearing words on a regular basis, so vocabulary becomes more difficult.

Another thing that we do when we create description currently is to identify a pause in the narration and try to find clear-cut, objective words to describe the visual content. As you can imagine, those pauses aren’t very long, so we can describe it only to a certain point. One of the things we want to be able to do, something we’re working on now, is to freeze-frame a picture, which would allow us to truly describe the narration and action. Let’s say you have a science program, and you want to show how a cell divides—if you could freeze that frame, take the time to really provide a good description for the blind student, you have made it truly accessible. Without the ability to use freeze-frame, you couldn’t properly describe the cell division. With it, the teacher and student have access to the top-level information contained, for instance, in AIT’s instructional videos. What we’re really trying to do is to take all the great programming out there and make it accessible and understandable. We don’t want to have to marginalize anyone with special programming just for them.

Are CaptionMax products targeted only to deaf or only to blind persons—or do your products include all audiences?

We want these services included altogether, so they’re available for all people in any setting—in other words, everyone basically is mainstreamed; no one is marginalized. We believe that many students can benefit from the multisensory input that captions and descriptions provide. The teacher will have options for utilizing all the services we provide, for any student who needs one. The teacher decides what access service to use on the DVD, which allows choice.

What is the Described and Captioned Media Program (DCMP)?

That used to be called the Captioned Media Program at the National Association of the Deaf (NAD). It’s a free lending library that qualified people could borrow captioned materials from, just like a public library. Now they can check out a DVD as well, and other materials that are also audio described. CaptionMax isn’t into distribution, like DCMP and AIT are, so we have partnered with them and with you to get the accessible materials out there in circulation to the targeted audiences.

What are the target audiences for these enhanced accessibility components?

Our major target audiences are the deaf, hard of hearing, blind, or low vision students. Most of these groups prefer not to use the term “impaired” because it implies a lack of capability in some way, a deficit. But these aren’t the only audiences. These products can be utilized by early readers, Spanish-speaking people, learning disabled students. There are a lot of uses for them.

Is there a national group for the blind, like NAD?

Yes, there are a few: The American Council of the Blind (ACB), which is national in scope and has affiliates in all fifty states; the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB), which is primarily a research organization with particular focus on education; and the National Federation of the Blind (NFB).

Why have these new accessibility components become necessary, when audiotapes and Braille publications are already available?

Your question points again to the marginalization issue. Audiotapes and Braille are great, but to be part of our American culture, you want to be able to watch, hear, and read the same programs or books that everyone else is watching and reading. Now, not all programs are described but most are captioned; and as of the early 1990s, all TVs with thirteen-inch or larger screens have closed-caption decoder chips built into them.

And now we have video streaming over the Internet, the Web, DVDs, and other digital technologies to contend with.

That’s right. The good news is that Google, for instance, now has a protocol for captioning; as do Windows MediaPlayer®, QuickTime®, and RealPlayer® online video services. So what started with DVD is moving online with accessibility components.

How do you envision these enhanced accessibility components to be applied to educational media? Why should they be?

It is paramount to us that education, which we feel must be attainable for all people in the future, must be therefore accessible to all. That’s why we’re in business, really. Just think about how it could be used…say you’re studying the Lewis and Clark expedition in social studies class, and you have a map that you want the students to use to follow the expedition. If it is fully captioned, fully described, the blind or deaf student can use it in class or at home. Maybe the teacher or students could visit AIT’s Web site to access other ancillary materials; those should be readily and fully utilized. We also believe that there will be a lot of individualized study and learning on the part of kids, and that could apply to kids with learning disabilities as well as those with hearing or sight issues. And we’ve already talked about ESL (English as a Second Language) students. There are many educational applications for these new components.

I’m wondering who are the people who do the audio describing for these projects? It sounds like an endless job!

It’s an incredible job, and a lot of people are involved. We have people who are very skilled writers and captioners, and they must follow standards and protocols. The national standards for captioning and describing are being written and revised now. We’re at the cusp of this exciting endeavor. We have a consumer advisory board and we’ve conducted focus groups that helped us with our audio descriptions, especially. For instance, how objective or subjective can a describer be? If I say, “A beautiful woman wearing a red dress walked through a doorway”—what does the word “beautiful” mean to a person born blind? It’s a subjective word. And what does the color “red” look like? It takes great care to truly describe the narration and action on the screen. So we’re really eager to have these standards set down and approved. Audio description has been around for about fifteen years, but people are just now becoming aware of it.

When will these products be available to the public?

We assume it will take maybe two or three months to get all the enhancements into the product, such as a DVD. Then, we hand it over to AIT, for instance, for distribution. Under these grants we’ll be enhancing 90 to 95 hours per year—and that means adding descriptions, captioning, working on navigation, all the things we talked about. And that will include work on teacher guides, too. We’ll be able to make captions and descriptions available for the Web quickly as well. Some of the other enhancements, such as the freeze-framing or in-depth descriptions or the glossaries, will take a bit longer because they are being developed as we’re working.

Will these products be available to the public, or just to educational institutions?

CaptionMax is not the educational expert—that’s what AIT does. So we’re starting with your instructional programming and providing the accessibility components. We’re hoping that AIT will make sure that schools and libraries understand that their programming is fully accessible. The intention is to get these products out, but AIT is the distributor for their enhanced instructional products.

What is the value of these products?

The value is inclusiveness—the idea that we want to include all different groups; we don’t want to exclude anyone. We want to see an even playing field for all the groups we’ve been talking about: deaf, hard of hearing, blind, low vision, learning disabled, ESL—everyone.

How did you get involved with CaptionMax?

I was involved with captioning through WGBH-TV, the public TV station in Boston. Before that I was involved with the Center for the Media Arts, which was a program that trained people in different kinds of media at the post-secondary level. I have an interest in education and have been involved in captioning for twenty years. Beyond that, the issue of access has always been an interest of mine.

This sounds like a great project!

It really is. We’re very excited about working with AIT because as a company you have so much to offer. I’ve learned so much from talking to your staff members about master teachers and how programs get developed and evaluated and distributed.

Have I not asked you a question you’d like to answer?

Yes, in regards to inclusiveness, I’d like to mention that our CaptionMax Web site is fully accessible. A blind person, for example, can use a screen reader to hear the descriptions of what’s on screen, including anything that’s not a word. The blind person can wave a screen reader in front of the screen, and the voice description of that graphic is heard. In addition, anything that is on screen is available in Spanish. CaptionMax also hires people with disabilities. We’re very serious about inclusiveness.