Background
The Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) was founded in 1993 with a major grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. NCAM acts as the research and development arm of WGBH's Media Access Group and is involved in technology and policy and program development to assure that the nation's media and technologies are fully accessible to people with disabilities.
NCAM is an extension of public broadcasting's ground-breaking work in media access that began in 1972 with the establishment of The Caption Center at WGBH and its groundbreaking development of captioning for deaf and hard-of-hearing television viewers. More recently, in 1990, public broadcasting's access mission resulted in the development of video description for blind and visually impaired audiences. NCAM and its sister organizations, The Caption Center and Descriptive Video Service® (DVS®), make up the Media Access department of the WGBH Educational Foundation.
NCAM is dedicated to equal access to media and information. Ongoing activities include: development of technologies that create access to public mass media, development of public media policies, research into how existing access technologies may benefit other populations, outreach to various communities and industries to educate people about media access issues, and support of the public broadcasting community in extending access to new and emerging programming and information.
NCAM strives to make media more accessible in schools, the workplace, the home, and the community. In addition to a focus on the retrofitting of existing media, such as television, radio, newspapers, and theatrical movies, NCAM is designing access into emerging telecommunications such as digital television, convergent media and Web-based multimedia. NCAM's mission is to ensure that the 45 million Americans with little or no access to media's sights and sounds will not be left out of the Information Age.
