An Ontario, Canada institution is drawing attention to its accessibility initiatives and resources. On December 3, in celebration of the International Day of People with Disabilities, McMaster University will award its first accessibility award to honor accessibility efforts on campus. Shortly, it will also publish an accessibility and disability inclusion update to profile the work being done on campus.
A startup based in Israel has raised $11 million to expand the growth of its solution for doing artificial-intelligence-powered transcription. Verbit technology, according to the company, will be helpful to schools in addressing the Americans with Disabilities Act regulation.
New tools are helping colleges and universities tackle the accessibility of instructor-created content, student coursework, note-taking and more.
Blackboard today introduced Blackboard Ally for Web, a solution for assessing and improving the accessibility of institutions' websites. The tool expands on Blackboard's Ally product (launched last year), which focuses on the accessibility of course materials in learning management systems.
Echo360 is teaming up with Amazon Web Services to make video content more accessible. The company today announced it will integrate Amazon Transcribe automated speech recognition technology into its video platform, giving each recording a viewable, searchable transcript.
The Rochester Institute of Technology is one of nine colleges to pilot the use of an artificial intelligence-powered speech and language technology that Microsoft has produced. Microsoft's Translator for Education provides the intelligence behind Presentation Translator, a Microsoft "garage project" that breaks down the language barrier by letting users offer continually updated subtitled presentations from PowerPoint. As the presenter speaks in one of 10 supported languages, the add-in generates subtitles directly under the presentation in any of 60 different text languages.
In an effort to provide a more inclusive learning environment for students, the Utah Education Network has partnered with Blackboard to roll out the company's Ally product at nine universities across the state. Ally integrates with an institution's learning management system and automatically checks course materials for common accessibility issues.
Following a semester-long pilot of Blackboard's Ally solution for accessible course content, the University of California, Berkeley is expanding its use of the technology across campus. The rollout will begin this fall, and by the end of next year, the system will provide accessible course materials to more than 40,000 undergraduate and graduate students, according to a news release.
Of an estimated 32 million children around the world who are deaf, hard of hearing or deaf-blind, four in five lack access to education, and just 2 percent get instruction in sign language. Because early exposure to sign language builds a stronger language foundation, those without it are affected in education, employment and social interaction.
Tulane University is simplifying the process of captioning its video and audio content. The institution worked with video management provider ShareStream to launch a new closed-captioning service that has been integrated into the ShareStream Video Platform.