Press Release
Director of the Media Access Group at WGBH
Appointed to FCC's Technological Advisory Council
June 12, 2001
Boston, MA — Larry Goldberg, Director of the Media Access Group at WGBH — comprised of The Caption Center, Descriptive Video Services and the CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media, a research and development facility — has been appointed to the Federal Communication Commission's Technological Advisory Council.
The Council, comprised of a broad array of the nation's leading technologists and chaired by Dr. Robert Lucky, Corporate Vice President, Telecordia, helps provide technological insights that the Commission needs to stay abreast of innovations in communications and related industries.
In addition to Mr. Goldberg from WGBH, members of the Council include representatives of the following companies and research institutions:
Applied Minds, Inc, AT&T, Cable Television Laboratories, Cisco Systems, Harris Corporation, Home Box Office, Hughes, Intel, Motorola, Panasonic, Philips Research, Siemans, University of Colorado, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Walt Disney Imagineering and WorldCom.
A complete list of Council members can be found on the FCC's Web site, http://www.fcc.gov.
Since Mr. Goldberg joined WGBH's access division in 1985, he has been deeply involved in a collaborative effort to assure that the nation's policies regarding new information systems and the design and implementation of those systems include a pragmatic goal of including people with disabilities. This focus has taken the form of numerous publicly and privately funded projects which examine these issues in educational and consumer-oriented settings. His most recent accomplishment in the policy arena is involvement with two new FCC Reports and Orders on video description and digital television closed captioning.
Mr. Goldberg has spoken and published widely on accessible media for consumers, for students, and for workers and has advised corporations, state and Federal government agencies and other institutions in the U.S. and abroad. In addition to his appointment to the FCC's Technological Advisory Council, he serves as a member of the FCC's Consumer/Disability Telecommunications Advisory Committee.
The Media Access Group is made up of two not-for-profit service departments, The Caption Center (est. 1972) and Descriptive Video Service or DVS (est. 1990), and the CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM), a research and development center with expertise in creating access solutions for traditional and emerging media. Solutions include captioning, description, audio menuing/navigation (for blind users) for convergent media and DVDs, multi-level and multilingual captioning, access systems for movie theaters and freeware tools for those companies or individuals interested in captioning and describing digital media.
For more information on WGBH's media access initiatives, please visit http://access.wgbh.org.
Contact:
Mary Watkins, Media Access Group at WGBH
mary_watkins@wgbh.org
617.300.3700 voice/fax
617.300.2489 TTY
