Last week my family was in St. Louis, Missouri for my daughter's annual language, academic and audiologic evaluations at The Moog Center for Deaf Education. While we were there, we participated in the Walk4Hearing walkathon sponsored by the Hearing Loss Association of America (HLAA). The purpose of the walk is to raise awareness about the causes and consequences of hearing loss and to raise funds to provide information and support for people with hearing loss.

The day of our walk was a spectacular, sunny day and we were joined by several friends, family and parents of deaf children as well as the children themselves. Attired in our freshly made HearingExchange t-shirts, we walked the 5K walk along the Missouri River. Our team raised over $1,000 for HLAA, one of the top fundraisers for the walk. If you would like to contribute to this wonderful cause, please click here and donate. Any amount is greatly appreciated!

Thanks to all who joined us! If you would like to participate in a Walk4Hearing walkathon, visit their site for information on upcoming walks around the country here.

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My good friend, Karen Putz, of the Deaf Mom's World blog and Disaboom columnist recently interviewed Marlee Matlin. Oscar winner Matlin is currently competing in the Dancing with the Stars television show. She's the first deaf participant and is wowing everyone with her magnificently graceful dancing moves despite her deafness.

Karen's interview is a great read and solidifies my view that Marlee is an excellent role model not only for deaf and hard of hearing children, but for children everywhere. Read Marlee's inspiring words about following your own dreams here.

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The Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (AG Bell) offers Arts and Science Financial Aid Awards to students, ages 6 to 19, to participate in after school, weekend or summer programs focused on developing skills in the arts or sciences.  Programs can be sponsored by museums, nature centers, art or music centers, zoological parks, space and science camps, dance and theater workshops or any other program with a focus on the arts or sciences.

Awards cannot be used for programs that offer academic credit, travel or study abroad, recreational summer camps, sports camps or sports, including figure skating or gymnastics.

Eligibility and application information is available online here. Deadline for submission is April 17th.

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People with hearing loss often complain about hearing noises even when they aren't wearing any hearing aids or cochlear implant processors. Tinnitus can be ringing, roaring or any number of sounds, all of which are annoying. Personally, my tinnitus arises when I'm under a lot of stress or when I've consumed too much caffeine but there are many other causes of tinnitus. Thankfully, researchers are coming up with new ways to combat tinnitus. The New York Times published an article about it yesterday which you can read online here.

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Just got great news from the online captioning innovators at Project readOn. In honor of their website's one year anniversary they launched a terrific new feature. Embedding videos has been a top user request for quite some time . Now you can grab the code to embed captioned Project readOn videos on your own website or blog at no cost to you.
 
Simply go to www.projectreadon.com. On the video player itself you will see two new buttons, Email this captioned video to a friend and Grab this captioned video for my website. When you click either of those buttons a small popup window will appear with the desired information. Just enter your friend's email address, or cut and paste the 'embed' code as needed.

I'm looking forward to using this feature at HearingExchange soon. For more information on Project readOn, read my previous posts linked below.

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Have you heard of Project readOn? If you haven't already, it's time to get acquainted. This terrific company and website whose mission of Access for All is committed to providing captioning and subtitles for many types of online videos including those covering news, politics, music and more. This is a jewel of a website for deaf and hard of hearing people and I wanted to know more about what makes them tick. Here's an interview I had recently with John Erskine, one of the co-founders of Project readOn.

Paula Rosenthal (PR): When did you form Project readOn?

John Erskine (JE): Project readOn was originally conceived in the summer of 2006 as we were looking for good solutions for digital media captioning. For a number of years we have owned and operated a traditional closed captioning and subtitling company, Rhino Moon Captioning. As a part of that experience, we realized that there was no simple solution for online captioning, and that the traditional ‘broadcast model’ for closed captioning would not work on the Internet. There were a number of technical options for online captioning, but in our opinion none of them are practical for most of the content that is prevalent on the web. So, we started brainstorming, and the idea of Project readOn was born.

PR: What is the focus of Project readOn?

JE: Our slogan is Access for All! and we are focused on providing access to online media content through captioning and subtitling. We have developed a customized captioning process, a captioning player and a robust website to support this mission. The player provides a technology solution which is easy to manage on our end, and easy to use for the viewer. It addresses many of the technological issues we found with existing online captioning methods such as software and operating system issues, player versioning issues, technical post-processing and remastering issues, and more. Our website is a portal for us to share content with the world. We hope that people will visit the site and enjoy the captioned content which is provided there!

PR: How did the idea for Project readOn come about?

JE: As mentioned, we have a background in the traditional captioning world and realized that a need exists for simple, good quality online captioning, and that the traditional broadcast model would break down on the web. The traditional broadcast model for closed captioning is expensive, requires many steps, and technical remastering for broadcast. There are technical hurdles, and a number of financial ones. The system we have created in Project readOn removes a number of these hurdles from the technical side, and is so efficient that we can reduce the financial hurdles to very manageable steps compared to the broadcast world.

PR: How many people are involved with Project readOn?

JE: There are three co-founders of Project readOn, and we have a team of professional transcribers and captioners who are available to work on the project. We have the capability to expand our production pipeline to a theoretically infinite amount, if the financial realities of that were supported. We also have software developers working on our player, website, database, and other technological aspects of the project.

PR: How is Project readOn supported financially?

JE: To date the entirety of the development, launch, and ongoing operation of Project readOn is a self-funded venture by the three founders. This has been a significant investment, and one we feel very strongly about. We each have over a decade of experience in cutting edge online applications and online communities, and have a number of years of experience in the traditional captioning world. So, Project readOn is an ideal marriage of these experiences. A primary business goal for the project has been to keep our fixed costs low because we believe high costs, and high expense, is a critical barrier to our mission.

With respect to our service being 'free', it is indeed free for our end users to use this service and watch captioned videos on our website. And we encourage everyone to suggest videos for us to caption, which won't 'cost' them anything if they do get captioned. Once we caption a video, everyone can enjoy it and it takes us one step closer to our mission of 'Access for All!'
 
However, as you can imagine, there are very real costs associated with providing this type of service which we must recover eventually. In order to remain a viable business for the long term, we have to make money somewhere! In order to do that, we are focusing on leveraging the true strengths of the Internet and want to break the shackles that hold back the 'traditional' model of closed captioning in the broadcast world.
 
For instance, the political partners on our site have formed a simple 'business agreement' with us whereby we will caption 100 minutes of content for free, and then after that point they pay a modest amount to cover the costs of the captioning. This offer is open to any candidate, so we believe there is no reason that EVERY candidate shouldn't use our service! We can't caption their content without their permission, so this is an arrangement that we feel can benefit everyone.
 
This is one just example of several ways that we are looking to 'fund' the project that we have created. We are exploring a number of other angles to fund the venture, but don’t have anything concrete to share with the public at this point. The important point is that this should be essentially 'invisible' to the users of our site. So, in a nutshell, we have to deal with the financial reality of any business, but believe that by harnessing the power of the internet and all the opportunities it provides, we can build a model that benefits everyone in the long run!

PR: How do you select which videos will be captioned?

JE: We have had such a great experience allowing anyone to suggest videos for captioning on our website, and we LOVE to interact with the actual users of the captions! This is by far my biggest joy with the project to date. In the broadcast world, we spend our time talking to production engineers and executives, and in reality have almost no interaction with the actual consumers of the product. This is one of the core realities that we wanted to 'break' with Project readOn.

Our best suggestions for content have come from our users, and have led us to many interesting projects (such as the one we have started with www.gratefulness.org). We get dozens to hundreds of suggestions each week, and we sift through them to find the best ones. Obviously ‘best’ could mean different things to different people. We try to select videos which have a broad appeal, or cover a topic that doesn’t have much content, or which seem to ‘hit a nerve’ with our users. For instance, we’ve found that people really like the captioned music videos we’ve put up on the site! We think this is really cool, and honestly it isn’t something we thought about a lot when we started imagining Project readOn. We get a number of suggestions which aren’t practical for various reasons, maybe too long (some are hours long in length), restricted access, etc. We keep everything in our database, so when we have the ability we may go back and caption *everything*, but right now we have to be somewhat choosy about what we can post.

PR: How many videos has Project readOn captioned thus far?

JE: We’ve captioned more than a thousand videos so far. Online videos seem to have a lifespan on the Internet though. Some are taken down, or the links change, so not everything is still linked from our site. I believe today we have something close to 500 active captioned videos on our site! We’ve also done a fair bit of work in Spanish which is not directly linked from our site at this time. We would love to launch a Spanish language version of our site in the future, but like everything we want to do it ‘right’ rather than do it ‘fast’, so this is still in concept at this point. However, a number of political candidates have had their videos captioned in English and Spanish, and we are happy to do it.

PR: Do you monitor how many times a video is viewed?

JE: Yes, we have tracking to monitor how many times a particular video is viewed.

PR: Which have been the most popular?

JE: The political videos have been very popular on the site, the Superbowl Ads we just posted have been a huge hit! The BangCartoon videos have been very popular, and music videos have been very popular. To date, we’ve served more than more than a hundred thousand views, and this number is growing more and more every day. Our site traffic and video views is trending upwards at a very nice rate!

PR: Can bloggers embed Project readOn’s captioned works into their blogs?

JE: Today this process is technically possible, but not simple. We have limited this functionality to our partner sites rather than opening it up to the general public. We decided that we’d rather wait and ‘do it right’ instead of doing it too soon. With that said, we are working on this functionality as we speak, and hope to have something to show to the public very soon. There is a new version of our player which went live this week with a number of performance enhancements and other back end improvements. The next version of the player will support embedding. So, stay tuned!

PR: How has Project readOn assisted in this year’s election campaign?

JE: We’ve captioned something like two to three hundred videos for various political campaigns including Clinton, Obama, Edwards, Harkin, Richardson, Franken, and more. We’ve provided content in English and Spanish, and many of these candidates have used our caption player on their website. We think this is awesome in every respect because it has put the issues of ‘access’ out in the open for these campaigns, and has shown that it doesn’t have to be difficult to provide captioned versions of web video for this type of environment.

PR: Can you tell us more about your relationship with political partners?

JE: We get a lot of questions about Project readOn political partners, and why we have the partners that we do (or don't). So I’ll share a little bit about our process, and hopefully motivate you to contact more political candidates that should provide their online videos with captions!

Due to the sensitive nature of political content, we must sign a simple, but 'formal' agreement with each candidate whose videos we caption. We offer a simple proposal to every political candidate: we'll caption 100 minutes of content totally free, then after 100 minutes there is a modest fee to cover our costs. This means that every candidate can take advantage of our service with as little barrier as possible. We believe there's no reason not to caption at least 100 minutes with Project readOn! We do not endorse any candidate, or any philosophy, we would love to include everyone in our mission!

We have contacted every candidate, but not every candidate has elected to participate in our service. If someone chooses not to participate in our service, then we can't caption their content due to the sensitive nature of politics. We'd like to thank those that have decided to take advantage of our service and provide 'Access for All!' for their content, and many candidates should be applauded for continuing the commitment beyond the 100 free minutes. We are especially excited about the commitment that Tom Harkin has made to caption all of his online content, and hope that others will follow his example for the benefit of everyone!

So, we'd love it if you reached out to the various political candidates that you care about, encourage them to use our service and take advantage of the opportunity that we provide! Our offer is open to anyone from the Presidential, Senate, or House races! By now the Presidential race is getting pretty narrow, so we’d really love to focus on the House and Senate races and sign up as many political partners as possible! We’d love to bring this issue and our message to the forefront of the political process!

PR: Were all of the campaigning politicians responsive to Project readOn?

JE: No, unfortunately not. We’ve contacted everyone in the presidential race, but only our existing partners have chosen to caption any of their content with us. And, they aren’t getting it captioned through another method either! Since the presidential race is narrowing down, we hope the last few candidates will get on board. And, we are now focused heavily on recruiting Senate and House candidates. Tom Harkin has been an early adopter of our service, which is no surprise since he is such an advocate of access! He has thrown down the gauntlet and committed to captioning all of his online content with Project readOn! Obviously we’d love to see others follow suit.

PR: What are your long-term goals for Project readOn?

JE: We would like to see the business become self-sustaining financially, we’d like to dramatically grow our ‘footprint’, and we’d like to provide access to online content for everyone! To this end, we are exploring multiple business angles to drive revenue, we are continuing to sign on new ‘partners’ to our site and expand our reach, and we are continuing to caption more and more videos, and adding more languages to our mix to appeal to an international audience! We would like for Project readOn, or some form of accessible option, to become a ‘given’ for all online media.

PR: Thank you so much for allowing us to interview you!

JE: Thanks so much for the interview and for being a vocal supporter of Project readOn! We want to spread the word and get more people watching captioned videos by Project readOn!

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Here's a guest blog post from Nancy Cave, the mother of the deaf teenager whose hearing service dog has been barred from assisting him in his East Meadow, Long Island school district.

"On Monday, March 11th, the NYS Division of Human Rights ruled that the East Meadow School District is in violation of two Human Rights laws by denying access to John Cave's service dog, Simba. The NYS DHR Commissioner ordered the East Meadow School District to change its policy regarding service dogs and to allow Simba to accompany John Cave to school. In light of this ruling, John Cave, accompanied by his mother, twin sister Jessica, attorney Paul Margiotta and family friend Frank Shamenek, attempted once again to go to school with Simba yesterday. Principal Timothy Voels once again denied Simba access to school. In other words, even though a NYS agency has stated that the school district is in violation of NYS laws, they are still thumbing their collective noses at all authority and refusing to allow John to bring Simba to school.
 
These actions are shocking in the extreme. Apparently the district administrators feel they have total autonomy and answer to no one. Their attorneys have advised them to appeal the state ruling - even though they have no chance of winning an appeal in this case. Of course, that means many more billable hours for the attorneys. One of these attorneys is currently under investigation by both the federal and state governments for fraud in billing school districts. Imagine that! And the school district is taking legal advice from this law firm.
 
The Federal Court of Appeals could not make up their minds on this case. However, they advised Paul Margiotta that the real protection was in the New York state laws and that he should take this case to the New York State Supreme Court. That is exactly what we will be doing - I think next week.
 
In the mean time, we are waiting for NYS DHR Commissioner Gibson to obtain a court order against the East Meadow School District in order to expedite Simba's entrance to W.T. Clarke H.S. We are also waiting for District Attorney Rice to jump into this matter. There is a penal code law that was enacted on 11/01/06 that makes it a Class B Misdemeanor to interfere with a service dog. So the question would be, why, in light of the NYS DHR ruling, has D.A. Rice not moved to enforce the law?
 
The wheels of justice move slowly. Simba is at home, waiting for his boy to return from school. We wonder how much longer Simba and JT will have to wait."

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In what may be a trailblazing decision, the New York State Division of Human Rights ruled against the East Meadow (Long Island) School District, finding that students with disabilities have an absolute right to attend school with their guide, hearing, and service dogs. If you're new to this case, click here to read previous posts on HearingExchange covering this interesting case of a deaf teenager with cochlear implants.

Below is the press release issued by the Human Rights office.

In the first decision on the subject, the Commissioner of the New York State Division of Human Rights, Kumiki Gibson, issued a Final Order today, concluding that the State’s Human Rights Law grants students with disabilities an absolute right to have their guide, hearing, and service dogs in school with them. Specifically, the Commissioner found that the East Meadow Union Free School District (“East Meadow”) has violated and is violating two separate provisions of the Human Rights Law -- one that prohibits educational institutions from denying access to their facilities to people with disabilities, and another that prohibits all entities covered by the Law from discriminating against people with disabilities because of their use of guide, hearing, and/or service dogs.

The Final Order was issued in a case commenced against the East Meadow, which educates approximately 8,000 students in Long Island. East Meadow has refused to recognize this civil right, adopting instead a policy that uses a case-by-case analysis, based principally on the federal American with Disabilities Act (“ADA”). East Meadow’s policy led to at least one student being denied access to his school with his service dog. That student had sued East Meadow in a separate action. The case before the Division, in which the Final Order was issued, was brought on behalf of all students with disabilities in the East Meadow School District and vindicates the rights of those students.

The Commissioner ordered East Meadow to immediately abolish its discriminatory policy and practice and to permit all students access to school grounds, facilities, classrooms, programs, and activities with their guide, hearing, and service dogs. In doing so, she distinguished between the broad and expansive protections for people with disabilities under the State’s Human Rights Law from the more restrictive ADA.

Upon issuing the Final Order, the Commissioner said: “If there were any questions about the scope of our Law with respect to people with disabilities, I hope that this Order will put them to rest: New Yorkers have rights and protections under both the Federal ADA and the State’s Human Rights Law; the State’s law is much broader than the ADA; and the Division is committed fully to enforcing our great State law. And, I trust that our educational institutions will be leading the charge in protecting the rights of students with disabilities under our great law -- not blocking access to classrooms, programs, and activities.”

A copy of the full decision is available on the Division’s website here.

UPDATE: Newsday.com reports that the East Meadow School District plans to bar the hearing service dog, Simba, despite today's ruling by the NYS Division of Human Rights. The district's aim is to continue the fight by forcing the issue into court. Get the full story here.

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It's a new age for cochlear implants as Newsday.com reported today. My terrific cochlear implant surgeon, Dr. J. Thomas Roland co-director of NYU Medical Center's cochlear implant center, recently performed cochlear implant surgery on a deaf man in Uganda free of charge. The implant manufacturer donated the device as well. Thanks to the Internet and telemedicine, his cochlear implant was programmed from New York by Bill Shapiro, the chief of audiology at the center.

The 23 year old man lost his hearing two years ago and was deemed an excellent candidate for the surgery. After the activation, the patient was able to hear and respond to questions the audiologist posed via cell phone. The full article is online here. It will be interesting to see if other doctors will perform similar feats for deaf and hard of hearing candidates in countries where there are no cochlear implant surgeons or clinics.

Remote programming will certainly open up new possibilities for implant recipients in developed countries as well. Many adults and parents report in online forums that they travel several hours each way for programming purposes one or more times a year.

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The Moog Center for Deaf Education in St. Louis will be hosting a Parent Education Workshop, Helping Your Child Learn to Talk, July 16 – 20, 2008.  The workshop is for parents and their children with hearing loss who are between the ages of 2 and 5 years old.  Each day, the workshop session will meet from 9 am -3 pm.  The adults will have classes in the professional education room and the children will meet in classes, divided by age and language ability. 

In the classes there will be a 1:1 ratio of adult to child and each child will receive daily individual instruction by a staff member of the Moog Center.  Everyone will meet together for lunch, provided by the Moog Center.  Afternoons allow time for naps and weather permitting, the children will enjoy water play. 

This will be their tenth year conducting this workshop and it just keeps getting better.  Every family that attends the workshop also has the opportunity to have an individual meeting with a staff member about a topic or concern of their choice.  Each day is packed full of activities for the children and information for the parents.  Enrollment is limited, so make your reservations early.

The workshop enrollment fee is $150 and the Moog Center has arranged a discounted room rate of $115 per night at a nearby Residence Inn by Marriott.

Past attendees have raved about the quality and volume of information they receive in this 5 day workshop. Enrollment is limited so make your reservations early by emailing Betsy Moog Brooks at bbrooks@moogcenter.org or by calling 314.692.7172.

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