2001 Conference Proceedings
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Distance Learning Projects at NCAM
Geoff Freed
Project Manager, Web Access Project
CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media
WGBH Educational Foundation
125 Western Ave.
Boston, MA 02134
voice: 617 300-4223
fax: 617 300-1035
e-mail: geoff_freed@wgbh.org
Introduction
The CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) is a
research and development facility dedicated to the issues of
media technology for disabled people in their homes, schools,
workplaces, and communities. NCAM's mission is: to expand access
to present and future media for people with disabilities; to
explore how existing access technologies may benefit other
populations; to represent its constituents in industry, policy
and legislative circles; and to provide access to educational and
media technologies for special needs students.
NCAM is also pioneering the use of accessible media in the
classroom through projects which empower students, educate
software and hardware developers, design new media access devices
and procedures, and in general help assure that disabled students
are able to reap the benefits of existing and emerging
educational media.
Access to PIVoT Project
NCAM is collaborating with the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology's Center for Advanced Educational Services to make an
on-line interactive physics course accessible to students with
disabilities. Known as "Access to PIVoT" (Physics Interactive
Video Tutor), this project will test, implement, document and
promote the development of multimedia access solutions to make
distance learning accessible to blind, low-vision, deaf and
hard-of-hearing students.
The Access to PIVoT project is built around MIT Professor Walter
Lewin's popular introductory physics class. Web-based components
include a complete digitized library of Professor Lewin's physics
lectures as well as dozens of help sessions, interactive
demonstrations and simulations, quizzes and a full on-line
textbook. Using the questions provided in an extensive FAQ list,
students will be able to choose second- and third-level follow-up
questions, invoking appropriately linked video responses by the
professor. Students will be able to get even more detailed
information by typing in questions and receiving responses from
an on-line teaching assisstant.
The goals of the project are to:
- enable science-focused high school and college students who
are blind, visually impaired, deaf or hard-of-hearing to
participate in an innovative and challenging Web-based
introductory physics curriculum;
- enable the MIT Center for Advanced Educational Services to
institutionalize the technical capabilities developed through
this project to apply access solutions to a range of future
educational products;
- provide developers, publishers, and distributors of
distance-learning and educational multimedia with recommended
practices and an applied demonstration of access-design
principles for network-delivered multimedia.
Project activities include the following:
- Identify the needs of deaf and blind students in the design
of the user interface, navigation systems, and presentation of
video, text, illustrations, graphs and tables.
- Research, test and evaluate the practical use of current and
emerging solutions to provide access for blind or deaf students.
Develop and implement a training and production plan to apply
solutions to PIVoT.
- Develop a set of recommended practices for design and
implementation of access solutions in network-delivered
educational multimedia. Disseminate recommended practices and
publicize Project results.
- Building upon NCAM's ongoing research into Web-based
multimedia accessibility, the PIVoT project will identify and
address the needs of deaf and blind students in the design of
user interface, navigation systems, and the presentation of
video, text, illustrations, graphs and tables. NCAM will develop
and apply cost-effective methods to create captions and audio
descriptions for the multimedia, primarily via the use of its
Media Access Generator, or MAGpie. Testing and evaluation with
disabled and non-disabled users will gauge the effectiveness of
results.
NCAM will also use the Access to PIVOT Project to test and
interpret existing guidelines and techniques (see the World Wide
Web Consortium's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), as
well as to develop a set of recommended practices for other
developers.
Funding for Access to PIVoT is provided by the National Science
Foundation and by The Mitsubishi Electric America Foundation, a
non-profit foundation jointly funded by Mitsubishi Electric
Corporation of Japan and its American affiliates with the mission
of contributing to a better world for us all by helping young
people with disabilities, through technology, to maximize their
potential and participation in society.
MAGpie
Developers of Web- and CD-ROM-based multimedia need an authoring
application for making their materials accessible to persons with
disabilities. NCAM recently developed and released such an
application, known as the Media Access Generator (MAGpie). MAGpie
is being used extensively in the PIVoT project to add captions to
all multimedia lectures and on-line tutorials. Using MAGpie,
authors can add captions to three multimedia formats: Apple's
QuickTime, the World Wide Web Consortium's Synchronized
Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL, using the RealPlayer) and
Microsoft's Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange (SAMI)
format. MAGpie can also integrate audio descriptions into
SMIL/RealPlayer presentations.
The MAGpie editor allows the user to type in or import text,
format it as captions, add color to both the text and background,
and make use of multiple fonts and styles. Once text has been
entered and formatted, it can be easily timed by playing the
digitized video and pressing a single key once per caption to
insert the appropriate timecode. The user can review the
captioned movie without exiting the application, make any
necessary changes directly in the editor and then see these
changes immediately. Once the captions have all been timed and
reviewed, the user can output the text in three formats:
SMIL/RealPlayer, QuickTime and SAMI.
MAGpie version 1.0 is a Windows-only application; however, NCAM
recently received funding to redevelop and improve MAGpie.
Version 2.0 will incorporate a number of new features, including
improved caption-editing capabilities and the ability to record
and insert audio-descriptions. MAGpie 2.0 will also be available
in a Macintosh version. Release date is expected to be mid-2001.
Initial funding for MAGpie was provided by the Trace Research
and Development Center at the University of Wisconsin, as part of
its Information Technology Access Rehabilitation Engineering
Research Center which itself is funded by the U.S. Department of
Education's National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation
Research (NIDRR). Funding for further development is provided by
NIDRR. Download MAGpie from NCAM, free of charge.
Standards for Accessible Learning Technologies
The Standards for Accessible Learning Technologies (SALT)
Partnership is a four-year initiative which involves partners
from every facet of the distributed learning industry. This
project will develop and promote open-access specifications and
support implementation models which enable people with
disabilities to access distributed learning resources.
Specifications will involve and serve the entire community of
public and private companies, organizations and individuals
developing learning resources. Project activities and results
will have an impact on the accessibility of on-line resources in
every conceivable learning environment: K-12, vocational and
post-secondary education, the government and the military, and in
and workplace training.
NCAM and the IMS Global Learning Consortium will co-lead the
project. Committed industry partners include Blackboard, Inc.,
Educational Testing Service (ETS), Microsoft Corporation, Pearson
Education, Sun Microsystems, PeopleSoft, Saba Software, and the
United Kingdom's Open University. Advisors include the leadership
of membership organizations in education and disability. Disabled
users will contribute to identification of barriers and
evaluation of proposed solutions.
The project has the following goals:
- Engage learning-technology companies, publishers, and
infrastructure and content providers in an ongoing national forum
to identify the features needed to make on-line learning
accessible and specify the resources and technologies needed to
implement solutions.
- Establish an industry-led IMS Working Group which will
develop, refine and proliferate formal access specifications for
online learning.
- Catalyze early delivery of accessible technical products,
resulting in products and services which allow people with
disabilities to access learning resources.
- Establish an industry-led IMS Working Group which will
develop, refine and proliferate formal access specifications for
online learning.
Solutions will serve the on-line learning industry and the 72% of
the nation's post-secondary institutions which enroll students
with disabilities. Project findings will also benefit the
nation's estimated 22 million deaf or hard-of-hearing people, 12
million blind or visually impaired people, and 8 million people
with motor impairments. Funding for the SALT project is provided
by the Learning Anywhere Anytime Partnerships Project (LAAP) at
the U.S. Department of Education .
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