WGBH Making Airline Travel More Accessible
Editor: WGBH has long been an active advocate of accessibility for people
with disabilities. Their most recent effort is to improve air travel
accessibility for people with hearing loss.
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Access to In-Flight Entertainment and Information for Passengers with
Disabilities Focus of Latest WGBH/NCAM R&D Effort
Project Begins as U.S. Department of Transportation Proposes Improvements
for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Travelers
WGBH's National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) has been awarded a
three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education's National Institute
on Disability Research and Rehabilitation (NIDRR) to make airline travel
more accessible to passengers with sensory disabilities.
The project, "Making In-Flight Communications and Entertainment
Accessible," will examine the technical barriers and develop solutions for
making the range of airline entertainment, communications and information
accessible to flyers with sensory disabilities. Solutions and resulting
recommendations will include the integration of captioning for video and
audio, descriptive narration for visual images and audio navigation for
system menus and interface design.
Partners for this project are the World Airline Entertainment
Association, Panasonic Avionics Corporation, and the National Center on
Accessible Transportation at Oregon State University. Caesar Eghtesadi,
president of Tech For All and an expert in accessible technologies, is
acting as project manager for NCAM.
The genesis of the project occurred in early 2004, when a representative
of Panasonic Avionics visited NCAM to ask for its assistance in making the
company's products accessible to people with disabilities, especially
motivated by his son who is blind. His interest was backed by years of
complaints by people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing who also desired access
to in-flight entertainment through captions. A proposal was submitted to
NIDRR to take on the challenge and was granted in late 2005.
Project activities began at a fortuitous time. The U.S. Department of
Transportation has recently issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM),
available now for public comment (through June 24, 2006), to address the
barriers passengers who are deaf or hard of hearing experience during air
travel, from departure lounge, at the gate, in flight and through to arrival
lounge. The NPRM is a result of many years of negotiation between Department
of Transportation officials, representatives of major national organizations
of deaf and hard-of-hearing consumers, and airline industry stakeholders.
Information about the proposed rule and instructions for commenting can be
found at: http://dms.dot.gov (search for Docket no. OST-2006-23999).
Each new project NCAM undertakes is guided by consumer concerns and is
built on its history of successful media access R&D efforts. Activities of
the following NCAM projects in particular will inform the Access to
In-Flight Entertainment project:
* Speech Solutions for Next Generation Media Centers
* Access to Convergent Media
* Access to Rich Media
* Motion Picture Access(r)/MoPix(r)
* Access to Digital Cinema
About WGBH's National Center for Accessible Media
WGBH developed captioning for television in the early '70s and brought video
description (description of on-screen action, settings, costumes and
character expressions inserted during pauses in dialogue) to television and
videos in the late '80s. Throughout the '90s, these services were applied
and integrated into other forms of mass media and for a range of venues,
including movie theaters, Web sites, and classrooms. Today, all of WGBH's
access initiatives are gathered in one division, the Media Access Group at
WGBH.
About WGBH
WGBH Boston is America's preeminent public broadcasting producer, the source
of fully one-third of PBS's prime-time lineup, along with some of public
television's best-known lifestyle shows and children's programs and many
public radio favorites. WGBH is the number one producer of Web sites on
pbs.org, the most-visited dot-org on the Internet. WGBH is a pioneer in
educational multimedia and in technologies and services that make media
accessible to the 36 million Americans who rely on captioning or video
descriptions. WGBH has been recognized with hundreds of honors: Emmys,
Peabodys, duPont-Columbia Awards... even two Oscars. In 2002, WGBH was
honored with a special institutional Peabody Award for 50 years of
excellence. For more information visit the WGBH Web site.
For additional information about all of NCAM's activities and the
projects mentioned, please visit http://access.wgbh.org.
