NEWSrelease

News from the National Captioning Institute, Inc.

Date: July 9, 2002

Contact: Jay Feinberg

703-917-7600 (V/TTY)

703-917-9853 (FAX)

jfeinberg@ncicap.org

National Captioning Institute Appoints Joel Snyder Director of Described Media

Washington, DC – President & COO of the National Captioning Institute (NCI) Jack Gates announced today the appointment of Joel Snyder as Director of Described Media for NCI.

In his new position, Snyder will head up NCI Described Media, a recently established NCI service that provides access to televised and recorded video programming for people who are blind or have low vision. Through a detailed process that provides a narrative description of a program’s visual elements on the SAP (Secondary Audio Programming) channel of televised programming, NCI Described Media mirrors NCI's efforts over more than 20 years to make television accessible through closed captioning.

“NCI is committed to making video programming accessible to all people,” stated Gates. “The addition of Joel Snyder will help NCI to build on its reputation for excellence and to expand the availability of described programming.”

As part of the description process, NCI describers review a video program and then write a script that provides a representation in words of the most relevant visual elements. The concise yet vivid descriptions are designed to fit easily into selected natural pauses and lapses in the dialogue. The information includes characters in a scene, location of a scene, who is speaking, what individuals are doing, what they are wearing, facial expressions and body language, text shown on objects in a scene, and colors or patterns.

A Federal Communications Commission rule took effect on April 1, 2002 requiring the top broadcast and cable television networks to begin describing at least four hours of programming per week in order to increase access for people who have limited or no sight. Other Federal regulations require that government agencies make videos and other multimedia training and informational material accessible through services such as description and captioning. Some movie studios have voluntarily started adding an extra soundtrack that includes descriptions on DVD releases.

Snyder worked for almost 20 years at the National Endowment for the Arts as a coordinator of funding for the nation's performing arts centers and festivals. He also became one of the pioneers in the art of audio description by helping to establish the first ongoing audio description service in 1981 for The Metropolitan Washington Ear, a reading service delivered by radio in the Washington, DC area.

Snyder’s work with description has enhanced PBS' American Playhouse productions, feature films and weekly series for network television, the IMAX film "Blue Planet," and the Planetarium show "And A Star To Steer Her By" at the Smithsonian Institution National Air and Space Museum. Snyder has trained docents and tour guides in audio description techniques at the White House, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, Sackler/Freer Galleries, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Design and the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City. He has trained audio describers for the performing arts in over a dozen states and has introduced description techniques in Israel, Romania, the Czech Republic and St. Petersburg, Russia, and trained describers for a first-ever audio description program in Sofia, Bulgaria. Snyder is the founding chair of the steering committee and a current board member of Audio Description International.

With offices in the Washington, DC metropolitan area; Burbank, CA; New York, NY; Dallas, TX; and London, England, the nonprofit National Captioning Institute is the global captioning leader, supplying the highest quality closed-captioning and related services to the broadcast television, cable and home video industries.

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