A new partnership will expand the availability of closed captioning (CC) and audio description (AD) in multimedia educational content–giving students who are hearing or visually impaired, are English language learners, or have other disabilities greater access to digital learning opportunities. The U.S. Department of Education (ED) has awarded two 5-year grants to CaptionMax for a collaboration with Discovery Education, intended to increase the accessibility of educational media used in K-12 classrooms.

Digital content that includes CC uses an on-screen transcription of the audio portion of a program. Deaf and hard-of-hearing students, as well as students with learning disabilities and those learning English, can follow along with classmates and keep pace with the rest of their class using CC. Many Discovery videos also will be audio described, so that visually impaired students can access program content through a voice-over that describes key visual elements. Besides benefiting visually impaired students, AD can help students who learn best aurally or through multi-sensory input, CaptionMax says.

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