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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