NCTI’s research efforts have revealed that COLLABORATION - from interpersonal to governmental levels - is a major aspect of success in the assistive technology and universal design of technology industries. Collaboration fundamentally complements the entrepreneurial spirit.

Larry Goldberg

Director of the Media Access Group at WGBH and the Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM)
 
WGBH Educational Foundation, Boston

Inquiries and Information:
ncam.wgbh.org; access.wgbh.org; access@wgbh.org

By Eric Morrison
Posted January 2007

Larry Goldberg was keenly interested in technological “toys” since childhood.  A self-described “geek from the AV (audio-visual) squad,” he began working with media in high school and studied cinema and broadcast journalism in college while working at TV and radio stations.  This, coupled with a fierce commitment to “public service and the democratic applications of technology,” put him on a natural collision course with one of the most enlightened media organizations – WGBH in Boston.

WGBH has been aggressively involved with media access since it produced the world’s first captioned television show, The French Chef With Julia Child, in 1972.  It has maintained a central focus on access to entertainment, informational, and entertainment media for individuals who are deaf or blind, but is also interested in the applications of its work for many populations, including description and captioning in multi-tasking environments and for persons with learning disabilities.

The profound commitment to access at WGBH is exemplified in a constellation of departments and features that continue under Larry’s energetic leadership.  These include: the first captioning agency: The Caption Center; the development of video description by its Descriptive Video Service; MoPix systems that have made nearly 300 theaters in the U.S. and Canada accessible with captioning and description; and its Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) with associated research and development labs for in-house software, hardware and public policy development.

Experience, research, and high-quality project outcomes have established WGBH as a national leader and consultant in accessibility sought as a partner by an impressive range of companies and organizations.   Apple came to NCAM when it came to the realization that it needed to create its own screen reader.  Larry says, “That was one of our interesting and fun consulting projects, one that helped result in VoiceOver.  This is a full-fledged, free screen reader which Apple amazingly developed in one year.  It’s built into every Mac operating system and integrated directly into many Mac applications.”  Similarly, AOL came to WGBH when they needed to “get up to speed on access issues” with its Internet service.  Larry is excited to be a part of these projects, but accords pride and credit to companies that initiate them, “As hard as it is to even consider such development tasks, I really have to tip my hat to these companies and our partners.”

A partial list includes:

1. Accessible High Definition (HD) Digital Radio Services
   WGBH and National Public Radio (NPR) are working as partners with HD radio developers under a grant to build bridges that will permit the extension of current captioning and descriptive services – as well as new capacities – into the emerging format.  For people who are deaf or hard of hearing, Larry envisions that “HD radio could actually have a text display right on the front of it” that would be able to display weather, traffic, emergency, and other types of information in ways that would dramatically increase inclusion in broadcast media – it might even have printing capability for longer text similar to TTY devices.  Through the partnership, NPR already piloted, with WGBH, captioning of its "Talk of the Nation" coverage about recent events at Gallaudet University.  With further development, news text of this type could be sent to HD radio as well.  Larry also recognizes that “radio has always been a critical companion” to people who are blind, and points out that special subscription codes should provide access to special reading, description, and information services.  To bring independence and controllability, NCAM is also working on special navigation strategies which would include talking menus and other applications of speech synthesis.
2. Media-Based Language Acquisition Assistance For Children Who Are Deaf Grants with the Department of Education have permitted WGBH to provide special programs including a web-based version of the PBS Kids program "Between The Lions" that was targeted to foster language gains in children who are deaf.  WGBH has also trained children on the East Coast to create their own captions using MAGpie web-captioning software it developed: the longitudinal impact on reading and writing abilities are being tracked.
3. Infrastructure Development for WGBH and the Media Access Group
   WGBH is building new headquarters and capacities for WGBH and its National Center for Accessible Media with the assistance of a million-dollar naming endowment from the Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family Foundation.  Larry credits this foundation as being “incredibly dedicated to helping people – especially kids – with disabilities access cutting edge media and technologies.
4. Accessible Airline Media
   WGBH is working with Panasonic Avionics and the World Airline Entertainment Association to develop accessible touch screens, captions, and description for in-flight media.
5. Mobile Technologies
   A major new initiative for NCAM includes a focus on captioning for hand-held devices, including cell-phones and PDA’s.  These devices present substantial potential for persons with disabilities in learning and communications, but also significant access challenges.

Larry waxes almost poetic about the criticality of collaboration: “I think it’s almost like breathing,  you can’t survive without collaborating.  We have broad ambitions and are trying to respond to a lot of needs… so virtually from the get-go of any idea we immediately start asking, who can we partner with?  If it’s anything you want to get out to the broad population, beyond pure research, you instantly have to think of industry -  the people who bring products to the field.”

WGBH exemplifies the trend toward developer involvement in shepherding the standards movement.  Larry is proud that they have been involved since “the earliest days of the development of textbook standards.”  This has included serving on the advisory board with CAST (the Center for Applied Special Technology) in bringing about NIMAS (National Instructional Media Accessibility Standard), as well as strong involvement with the American Federation for the Blind Solutions and the Open E-Book Forums.  Larry is tenacious in drawing partners’ attention to accessible multimedia content as well as text.

Larry adds, “The big standards project we have worked on for the last five years is the IMS Global Learning Consortium – a group of learning management system companies and universities – we’ve helped develop ‘Access For All,’ a metadata standard for tagging content in a variety of environments (including WebCT).  WGBH is implementing this tagging process to designate access for specific populations on its own powerful ‘Teacher’s Domain’ website.  The site delivers courses, interactive web objects, documents, video and audio clips, and other content for K-12 and postsecondary instruction. 

(Accounts can be set up at teachersdomain.org, and a video presentation of teachers incorporating these web services can be viewed at teachersdomain.org/courseinfo/popup.html.)

The accessibility demo can be seen at: http://www.teachersdomain.org/accessdemo/index.html

WGBH has a powerful network of conduits for discovering needs and identifying areas of inaccessibility to address as it selects its projects. Larry indicates, “We are constantly gathering and filtering information directly from consumers in a variety of ways, including our email link, access@wgbh.org.”   Internally, WGBH has teachers, researchers, and an accessibility analyst who is blind (a technology power-user) on-staff who provide input on the state of educational media and help point the way to new partnerships.  The Media Access Group maintains strong working relationships with top local and national disability organizations and establishes user focus groups.  Larry also cites “an extroverted attitude” at conferences, including the weighty International Consumer Electronics Show where an important meeting with players in HD radio was recently held to see “what’s next” in broadcast media opportunities.

Larry is fascinated – and concerned – about what he terms “very powerful technologies and media that are entering the living room, schools and workplaces.  Virtually every device is a computer that is going wireless – they’re all networked with each other and even with hand-held devices like PDA’s.  Each one of them might not be very accessible individually, BUT if you could have one interface that is, then they ALL could be!”

Larry ends with some final advice, appreciably echoing much of what NCTI has discovered through its interviews:  “You have to indicate a willingness to work with anyone… it just doesn’t work if you try to keep things proprietary and try to hold innovations to yourself.”