WGBH Announces Online Learning Access Initiative

Editor: Home computers and the associated technology have been a boon to people with hearing loss, because they have relied heavily on visual information. The advent of new audio technology threatens to change that situation, and people with hearing loss need to be aware of developments in these disciplines. WGBH in Boston has been in the forefront of ensuring that new technology remains accessible to people with hearing or vision loss. They are now joining with IMS in a new initiative to ensure that online learning systems remain accessible. Portions of the press release are provided below.

For additional information, please contact;

Mary Watkins at WGBH
617-300-3700 voice/fax
617-300-2459 TTY
mary_watkins@wgbh.org

Caroline Oldershaw at IMS
coldershaw@imsproject.org

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The Corporation for Public Broadcasting/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) has been awarded a $1.8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Learning Anytime Anywhere Partnerships program* to establish an alliance with industry to make online learning (or e-learning) resources accessible to people with disabilities.

The initiative, called SPECIFICATIONS FOR ACCESSIBLE LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES, or the SALT Partnership, is a four-year initiative to develop and promote open access specifications and effective models that will help level the playing field for learners with disabilities. Millions of permanently or circumstantially deaf, hard of hearing, blind, low vision and mobility-impaired learners and learning authors and providers are increasingly disadvantaged - at home, at school, in their communities, and in the workplace - because they cannot fully utilize online learning resources.

NCAM, the research and development arm of the Media Access Group at Boston public broadcaster WGBH, will lead the project working closely with IMS Global Learning Consortium, a worldwide coalition of more than 230 educational institutions, Federal agencies and private companies developing technical specifications for online learning.

The scope of this problem and the potential of online learning to empower people with disabilities are reflected in the report recently released by Congress' Web-Based Education Commission, available at: http://www.hpcnet.org/webcommission.

The US government has begun to address this issue by establishing minimum access requirements, available at: http://www.access-board.gov/news/508-final.htm.

A statement by the U.S. Department of Education about these new rules is available at: http://www.ed.gov/PressReleases/12-2000/122100b.html.

NCAM and IMS will establish an industry-led Working Group on Accessibility to identify the features needed to make online learning accessible, and to specify the resources and technologies needed to implement solutions. The IMS Working Group will engage leading companies involved in product development, institutions implementing distributed learning environments, and international standards organizations. Initial partners include Blackboard, Inc., Educational Testing Service (ETS), Microsoft Corporation, Pearson Education, Sun Microsystems, PeopleSoft, Saba Software, and the United Kingdom's Open University.

Industry partners have committed to serve as early adopters of specifications. With NCAM's help, technology providers will work with publishers to enable and implement access features within platforms, applications, and content. Blind, low vision, mobility impaired, deaf and hard-of-hearing consumers will contribute to identification of barriers and evaluation of proposed solutions. Specific capabilities which will be implemented into various partners' products and services include:

- means to enable alternate presentation in response to learner profiles
- means to identify and activate accessibility features within content
- solutions to enable accessibility of text- HTML, XML, PDF and E-books
- solutions to enable accessibility of multimedia content- audio, video, illustrations
- solutions to enable accessibility of special material- mathematical notation, graphs, charts

* Learning Anytime Anywhere Partnerships (LAAP) is a program of the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), Office of Postsecondary Education, U. S. Department of Education.

NCAM and its fellow access departments at WGBH (The Caption Center and Descriptive Video Service(r)) make up the Media Access Group at WGBH. WGBH, Boston's public broadcaster, pioneered captioning and video description on television, the Web and in movie theaters. NCAM is a founding member of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). NCAM works with standards bodies and industry to develop and implement open technical standards for multimedia, advanced television, and convergent media that ease implementation, foster growth and lay common groundwork for equal access to new technologies. For more information visit the Media Access Group's Web site at access.wgbh.org.

The IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc. is a member-supported worldwide coalition supported by colleges and universities, the Department of Defense, the Department of Labor, and industry leading providers of education and training technology solutions. IMS' mission is to facilitate the delivery of internet-based distributed learning to all users and all user environments, worldwide. IMS develops specifications designed to ensure the creation of content and learning management systems that permit sharing across institutions and across technical environments. For more information visit the IMS Web site at www.imsproject.org.