Born Digital - and Accessible

Date: January 28, 2013

Time: 1:00 p.m. ET (UTC-5) runs one hour; convert to your time zone

Special Guests

Larry Goldberg
Director
WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM)

Larry Goldberg is the founder and director of the Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) at Boston's public media leader, WGBH, where he has worked since 1985. NCAM is a research and development group that focuses on public policy initiatives and strategic corporate and governmental partnerships to advance access to media and technology for people with disabilities. Under Goldberg's leadership, NCAM has conducted dozens of innovative R&D projects for full inclusion in such fields as online education and digital publishing, mobile devices and mobile media, in-flight entertainment, home media networks, web-based media, theatrical motion pictures, museums and theme parks, and many others. Goldberg regularly briefs Congressional and regulatory agencies on barriers and opportunities in new and emerging media and was instrumental in the passage of landmark legislation for accessible media and technology.

Madeleine Rothberg
Project Director
WGBH NCAM

Madeleine Rothberg is a project director for WGBH NCAM. She is an expert in access solutions for users with disabilities, both through directly accessible solutions such as captions, AT compatibility, text-to-speech, and image and audio description and through improvements to infrastructure through standards for enterprise-level interoperability. She is founder and co-chair of the Access for All working group in the IMS Global Learning Consortium. Submission of the Access for All specifications to the International Standards Organization (ISO) resulted in ISO/IEC standard 24751, “Individualized Adaptability and Accessibility in E-Learning, Education, and Training.” Her current work includes applying Access for All to assessment, in the APIP standard, for cloud-based accessibility, in the Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure (GPII) initiative, in digital libraries through NSDL, and in personal health records, NCAM's latest research project.

Summary

Join Malcolm Brown, EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative director, and Veronica Diaz, ELI associate director, as they moderate this webinar with Larry Goldberg and Madeleine Rothberg of WGBH NCAM. The digitization of online learning and media, including electronic publishing and textbooks, has brought both great opportunities and unique challenges for colleges and universities with a mission to serve all of their students inclusively. Anywhere, anytime learning in malleable and flexible digital formats can provide students with disabilities timely and equal access as never before. However, old models of retrofitting materials no longer work and can be vastly expensive.

A new approach, building infrastructure and enhancements into content and delivery from conception, enables direct and on-demand access for all: learning materials and processes can be "born digital—and accessible." In the past few years, more than ever before, resources and tools have become available to support this goal. Progress is evident in a variety of sectors: federally funded research and development projects, commercial enterprises large and small, cloud-based services with distributed labor, hardware and software manufacturers, and advocacy and standards organizations.