Press Release
Benetech, WGBH National Center for Accessible Media and U.S. Fund for DAISY Receive $5 Million to Transform Production of Accessible Images
Palo Alto, CA (PRWEB) March 3, 2010
The U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), awarded $5 million to Benetech, in collaboration with The Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) at WGBH and the U.S. Fund for DAISY (USFDAISY), to create a research and development center that will greatly improve the processes and availability of accessible images for students with disabilities. The new Digital Image and Graphic Resources for Accessible Materials Center (DIAGRAM) will develop tools and best practices that will make it easier and more cost-effective to create and use accessible images across a range of educational content. “Together, we are committed to creating tools and best practices that anyone can use to make graphical content more accessible and widely available,” says Jim Fruchterman, CEO of Benetech, the nonprofit organization that operates Bookshare. “Educators and students with print disabilities will have unprecedented opportunities to use devices and software to make access to image and graphical content a reality in educational materials.” The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act 2004 (IDEA) calls for timely access to educational materials; through projects such as Benetech’s Bookshare for Education, access to text has greatly increased. Yet, educational materials include a wide array of other types of content. The burden of accessible image preparation typically falls on educators, who have limited time and tools to create useful descriptions or accessible graphics for students. Too often, students using text-based accessible instructional materials (AIM) are presented with only the words “image” or “graphic” when the devices they use to read digital text encounter illustrations, equations, graphics, photos or diagrams in textbooks. “With such a wide array of media becoming more popular, it’s more important than ever to foster collaboration and innovation by encouraging nonprofit and commercial enterprises to work together to solve this problem,” said George Kerscher, Secretary General of the DAISY Consortium and head of the U.S. Fund for DAISY. Through rigorous research and testing, over the five year period of this award, the DIAGRAM center will help create a set of tools for producers of accessible instructional materials, such as publishers and state and local education agencies, to expand the field of image description and interactive exploration of graphical content. “As an early pioneer with years of experience in the challenges of image and media accessibility, NCAM believes the collaboration of these three partners will have a profound impact on the education of students with print disabilities,” said Larry Goldberg, WGBH’s Director of Media Access, who oversees NCAM. Each of the DIAGRAM center partners has led technology initiatives that fundamentally changed how people with visual and other print disabilities experience and interact with all forms of media, from the DAISY standard to the Bookshare library to NCAM’s work on image descriptions. Bookshare is an initiative of Benetech, a Palo Alto, CA-based nonprofit that creates sustainable technology to solve pressing social needs.