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NCAM

The Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family National Center for Accessible Media at GBH

For over two decades, the National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) has been a national leader in making digital media accessible for people with disabilities.

The team in NCAM—with over 150 years of combined experience in accessibility—are pioneers, inventors, and problem-solvers, frequently anticipating and creating solutions for tomorrow's technology challenges.
Accessibility Consulting Services
Making any digital service or product accessible guarantees opportunities for organizations to broaden their reach, and to impact the largest possible audience of customers and users. NCAM has partnered with industries that have recognized the need for accessible content, interactivity, and functionality throughout all stages of the digital experience.

Accessibility means something different for each industry, organization, audience, and product. With that in mind, NCAM tailors its services to meet a broad range of trends, needs, and expectations. Simply match your goals with one or more of NCAM’s services to learn about the accessibility possibilities.
  • NCAM - Strategic Planning and Advising

    Strategic Planning and Advising

    The WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) works closely with our strategic partners to help them build internal accessibility expertise and gain valuable knowledge in the areas of digital television, rich media, convergent media, internet, e-books and other forms of media. We marry NCAM's research and development projects with the specific needs of each partner. We asked our partners to tell us why the program works for them, and how it is making a difference to their customers and employees with disabilities.
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  • Bryan Gould

    Training

    NCAM can provide in-person or online training, offering a primer on how users with disabilities interact with technology and experience different media, and what it means to make that media accessible. NCAM will customize the training to your industry and your staff, vendors, clients, or user group by integrating your content and intellectual property into the training materials.
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  • NCAM Evaluations

    Evaluations

    NCAM performs accessibility evaluations for websites, applications, hardware and all types of electronic documents for conformance with Section 508 regulations, state accessibility requirements and all levels of WCAG 2.0.
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  • NCAM Standards and Regulations

    Standards and Regulations

    NCAM participates in policy and standards-setting activities across a broad range of media-related areas, and has served as a technical resource to both industry and government.
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  • NCAM Software Development

    CADET

    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. CADET can also be used to generate audio-description scripts.
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  • NCAM Custom Solutions

    Custom Solutions

    Accessibility means something different for each industry, organization, audience, and product. With that in mind, NCAM tailors its services to meet a broad range of trends, needs, and expectations. Where accessibility solutions exist, NCAM can support implementation; where they do not, NCAM creates them.
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Impact
Impact

Accessibility means something different for each industry, organization, audience, and product. With that in mind, NCAM tailors its services to meet a broad range of trends, needs, and expectations.

Making any digital service or product accessible creates opportunities for your organization to broaden its reach, impacting the largest possible audience of customers and users. NCAM has partnered with industries that have recognized the need for accessible content, interactivity, and functionality throughout all stages of their customer’s unique digital experience.

NCAM's work has impacted dozens of industries, including the following:

  • Academic publications
  • Colleges and universities
  • Electronics manufacturers
  • Technology companies
  • Online retailers
  • Media producers, providers and broadcasters
  • Local, state and government agencies
  • Software, hardware and app developers
  • Cultural institutions, amusement parks and stadiums
  • Assessment, credentialing and certification organizations
  • Law firms
  • Airlines 
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People
The team in NCAM—with over 150 years of combined experience in accessibility—are pioneers, inventors, and problem-solvers, frequently anticipating and creating solutions for tomorrow's technology challenges.
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Highlights
  • Transcoder.png

    3 Key Changes that Made Broadcast TV More Accessible in the U.S.

    Geoff Freed has spent more than 30 years leading broadcast, web, and multimedia accessibility initiatives at WGBH in Boston. He’s the Director of Technology Projects and Web Media Standards at the National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM), which operates out of WGBH. Throughout his career, he’s seen changes that have made broadcast TV more accessible. Here are the three most major ones he’s seen.
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  • NCAM TGAR

    The Great American Read: Making Off The Page Experiences Accessible

    Innovation Hub's Kara Miller sat down with Bryan Gould from NCAM and Renee Ruthel from Media Access Group to discuss how they are making these broader experiences of loving a book accessible to people who are blind/low vision or deaf/hard of hearing.
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  • NCAM Wins FCC Chairman's Award for Accessibility

    NCAM Wins FCC Chairman's Award for Accessibility

    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.
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Tools and Resources

Below are free resources available to the public. For more information about our consulting services and custom solutions, please contact us here.

  • NCAM Software Development

    Download CADET

    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.
    Learn More
  • NCAM Image Description

    Image Description

    Images require text alternatives (descriptions) to provide a comprehensive experience to people who are blind or have low vision. NCAM has produced several research-based guidelines for describing images.
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  • HTML5 and javascript

    HTML5 & Javascript

    NCAM has combined TTS technology with advances in markup languages to deliver accessible supplemental information that helps make science- or math-focused video materials more accessible to blind and visually impaired users.
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Awards and Patents
Awards and PatentsSoftware and Systems
  • 1991-1998: Developed and released CC School, QuickCaption for Word and QuickCaption School, captioning software for use in classrooms.
  • 1992: Launched MoPix, a project to research and develop ways of making movies in theaters accessible to deaf, hard of hearing, blind, and visually impaired people through closed captions and descriptive narration.
  • 2000: Released MAGpie, the world's first free software for adding captions and audio descriptions to online multimedia.
  • 2007: Developed CCforFlash, a free Flash component to display captions in Flash video and audio content.
  • 2015: Created CC WebStreamer (aka TextStreamer) for repurposing broadcast caption data for online distribution, supporting both real-time and pre-produced captions.
  • 2016: Developed CADET, a free browser-based tool for adding captions and audio descriptions to online video and audio.
Research
  • 2000: Created first-ever guidelines for accessible science and math educational software.
  • 2000: Founded IMS Global Learning Consortium's Accessibility Working Group which led to the creation of the Access for All distributed learning standards.
  • 2008: Published Effective Practices for Describing Images, for creating meaningful image descriptions textbooks and online materials.
  • 2010: Co-established the DIAGRAM Center, along with Benetech and the U.S. Fund for DAISY, to research, develop and create tools, standards, guidelines and training to make it easier, cheaper, and faster to deploy accessible digital images.
  • 2012: Published Describing Images for Enhanced Assessments
  • 2012: Collaborated with IBM Research-Tokyo to research and develop methods of delivering text-based audio descriptions for online video.
  • 2012: Prototyped solutions for delivering accessible supplemental materials alongside online video.
  • 2015: Created a prototype accessible Personal Health Record system to demonstrate accessible health information technology
Standards and Policies
History
Our History

The National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) was originally founded in 1991under its name: the Media Access Research and Development Office (MARDO), which was a pioneering facility dedicated to examining the needs and desires of audiences traditionally denied access to media in all forms. In 1993, with funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), MARDO was renamed the National Center for Accessible Media, which was quickly condensed to the now-familiar acronym, NCAM (pronounced "N-CAM"). In 2006, NCAM received a major five-year gift from the Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family Foundation to complement NCAM's federal, corporate and foundation support. In recognition, NCAM was renamed the Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family National Center for Accessible Media at WGBH.

NCAM's broad mission has always been to ensure that media and all forms of electronic communication are fully accessible to people with disabilities. NCAM is an extension of WGBH's ground-breaking work in media accessibility that began in 1972 with the establishment of The Caption Center and the development of captioning for television viewers who are deaf and hard-of-hearing. In 1990, WGBH's access mission was expanded by the development of video description for television audiences who are blind and visually impaired, and the establishment of Descriptive Video Services (DVS). NCAM's work in Web accessibility stretches back to 1996, when it launched the Web Access Project, one of the first studies focusing on accessible online materials.

NCAM influences technology development and public policy through research into effective practices; development of demonstration models, solutions and standards; and advocacy and outreach. These efforts have had a significant impact on the accessibility of Web technologies, streaming media, interactive technologies, e-book hardware and software design, distributed learning platforms, digital libraries and mobile content and devices in every conceivable environment. Read more about NCAM and GBH's major milestones in media accessibility.

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