Highlights NCAM Wins FCC Chairman's Award for Accessibility

NCAM Wins FCC Chairman's Award For Accessibility

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From NCAM: Brad Botkin, Developer; Bryan Gould, Director of Accessible Learning and Assessment Technologies; and Donna Danielewski, Director, with FCC Chairman Ajit Pai.

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Bryan Gould, Brad Botkin and Donna Danielewski of NCAM.

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Donna Danielewski, Director of NCAM, accepts the award.

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Brad Botkin, Lead Developer of CADET, with the award.

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Chairman AAA Winners table

By WGBH Staff

What’s free, easy to use, and just won the FCC Chairman’s Award for Accessibility? CADET! The Caption and Description Editing Tool (CADET) is free, downloadable caption-authoring software that enables anyone to produce high-quality caption files that are compatible with any media player that supports the display of captions. The NCAM team accepted the recognition at an awards ceremony in Arlington, VA, and will also be commemorated on a permanent plaque on display at FCC Headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Having also won the FCC Chairman’s Award in 2012 for its Media Access Mobile (MAM) technology, NCAM becomes one of only two organizations to have won the award more than once (the other, Microsoft, won in 2011 and 2018) in the award’s seven-year tenure.

WGBH has a long legacy in this space. CADET builds on the success of MAGpie, which was released by WGBH in 2000 as the first do-it-yourself captioning app to be made available online, and it's here at WGBH where broadcast captioning was invented in 1971 (debuting on The French Chef with Julia Child!). With millions of Americans relying on caption technology (and many more using captions who do not have hearing loss), providing this essential service ensures that content producers can make their media accessible to all.