Subject: [acb-l] Access to In-Flight Entertainment and Information Systems
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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?/MoPix? - 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. For more information, visit
< http://access.wgbh.org
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