Last week, half of the Knowbility team dispersed over San Antonio, Houston, and Washington D.C. to spread the good word of ATSTAR and AccessU.
Jessica took to Washington D.C. for the M-Enabling Summit where she was invited to sit on two panels, Media on the Internet: Accessibility Challenges and Opportunities and App Developers, Competing for Accessibility Innovation. President and CEO of AMI, David Errington, led the panel, which included Chet Cooper of Ability Magazine, Mike Paciello of The Paciello Group, and Joel Snyder, president of Audio Description Associates. There are many challenges currently facing the creation of accessible media content, the biggest of which is a sense of urgency to do so, or lack thereof. Still, the tides are turning on that front, if slowly. Take Netflix, for example, which, in a notable move, added audio description to its popular Daredevil series. Setting universal standards is the next priority as, like Jessica says, “Get three audio describers in a room and you may get four descriptions of the visual content.”
On accessible apps, Knowbility shared its experience dabbling in the app development world with the creation of the AccessU 2016 App through Guidebook. For its first year out of the gate, the app performed overall successfully, with the notable exception of its inaccessibility. Obviously, making the app fully accessible is first on the list of changes to make before next year’s conference. Speaking of AccessU, while in D.C., Jessica got the chance sit down with a few of the conference’s biggest sponsors including Mike Paciello, Caitlin Cashin (Deque Systems), and Mary Smith (SSB Bart) to discuss the future of AccessU and other Knowbility initiatives.
Back down in Texas, Molly made the drive up to Houston for the Texas Assistive Technology Network Conference (TATN), where she spoke with a friendly array of educators, administrators, speech pathologists, and occupational therapists about the benefits of implementing ATSTAR at their respective schools. Though the significant majority of attendees at this particular conference already have the AT basics down pat, interest levels were high for a course that would help the rest of their colleagues get on the same page.
The conversation of implementing ATSTAR on a district-wide level continued in San Antonio, where Sharron rounded out the travel-heavy week with a breakfast meeting that gathered representatives from all six of the city’s school districts. Attendees of the breakfast watched a demo of the course, heard about effectiveness studies that we conducted on schools and educators that have used it, and how their districts can get involved. This coincides with the cementing of ATSTAR’s collaboration with AISD, which, beginning in July, will make the curriculum available to all educators in the district. All in all, exciting things are happening in these dog days of summer but we’re happy to be all back in that dry, familiar heat of Austin!