Descriptive & Captioned Media
OPEN LETTER RE:
DESCRIBED & CAPTIONED MEDIA PROGRAM
READ CAPTIONS ACROSS AMERICA
Fri, 08 Feb 2008
From: Thomas Lohman
Subject: Described and Captioned Media Program/Read Captions Across America
Good morning,
I am the communications services specialist for the Described and Captioned Media Program (DCMP), a non-profit organization funded by the U.S. Department of Education and administered by the National Association of the Deaf. Our primary function is to serve as a free-loan lending service for accessible (captioned and described) educational media to benefit K-12 students who are deaf, hard of hearing, blind, visually impaired, or deaf-blind. We also advocate for increased accessibility in educational media, maintain a clearinghouse of information about captioning and description, and evaluate captioning and description vendors who wish to appear on the U.S. Department of Education’s approved vendors list.
I’ve noted that the State DB Listserv is primarily intended for directors of state deaf-blind programs. Since our service is educational in nature, and completely free of charge for parents, teachers, and others involved with educating qualifying students (our information services are available to everyone, regardless of relationship to qualifying students), we were hopeful that you might post a message to parents, letting them know about our service, which has been quite useful for our thousands of members, many of whom are faced with a severe shortage (or complete absence) of accessible educational media in their children’s schools.
Our Web site (www.dcmp.org) provides a wealth of information about our services, and those interested in applying for our free-loan service should consult our site to sign up.
The second purpose of my message today is concerning Read Captions Across America (RCAA - www.dcmp.org/about/prelations/events.aspx), an annual campaign (now in its third year) affiliated with the National Education Association’s (NEA) Read Across America campaign (www.nea.org/readacross). For anyone not familiar with Read Across America, it is celebrated every year on the birthday of Dr. Seuss (this year, March 3rd), and its purpose is to increase awareness of childhood literacy. Our RCAA campaign stresses the utility of reading captions to the goal of improving literacy. On our RCAA Web page (again, www.dcmp.org/about/prelations/events.aspx), we have linked a multitude of informative information about the literacy benefits of captioning, as well as a host of useful materials for parents and teachers (and others) to utilize in planning RCAA-related events.
Also, this year, we were pleased to learn that 20th Century Fox plans to release the CGI animated film “Horton Hears a Who” on March 14th, which is right on the heels of RCAA. Even more exciting is that “Horton” will be released with captions and description to participating theaters (those which have the MoPix Rear Window Captioning or DTS-CSS Subtitling system installed). We are hopeful that a groundswell of support for accessible films will encourage the major studios and distributors to include accessibility in more films.
DCMP’s January 2008 newsletter, just completed, provides a quick look at RCAA, including information about “Horton.” You can access the newsletter at www.dcmp.org/outreach/newsletter/january2008.html.
As stated above, we hope that you will consider posting some (or all) of this information for State-DB’s members. Please feel free to draw from the Public Relations page on dcmp.org ( www.dcmp.org/about/prelations/default.aspx), where logos, quick “blurbs” and other materials are available.
Thank you for considering DCMP, and for the service you provide to your members! If you have any questions, please feel free to e-mail me directly.
Thomas F. Lohman
Communications Services Specialist
National Association of the Deaf
Described and Captioned Media Program
1447 East Main St
Spartanburg, SC 29307
(800) 237-6213 ext. 222 VOICE
(800) 237-6819 TTY "Thom"
(800) 538-5636 FAX
dcmp.org