An accessible Obama inauguration
In case you have been living on Mars, today at noon in Washington and 5.00pm in the UK, Barack Obama will be inaugurated as 44th President of the United States of America. The event will be broadcast around the world, and is expected to pull in the biggest TV viewing audience ever. But will it be accessible?
Happily, yes. The coverage promises to be closed captioned and audio described as it happens, so if you live in the US, make sure that your TV is on all the right settings.
For all of you who don't live in the US but would like to tune in to this historic event, the website of the is providing two live streams of the event, one with closed captioning, and the other with audio description. Details are available on their home page.
The Media Access Group at , a non-profit service of the WGBH Educational Foundation in Boston, Massachusetts, will provide both the closed captioning and live description . these guys are the main audio describers in the US. If you see a movie marked DVS, that's their term for AD.
Anyway, enjoy the coverage, and let us know how you got on with the audio described and captioned streams in the comments below.
Comment number 1.
At 22nd Jan 2009, dennisjunior1 wrote:Emma:
I think that the coverage was very accessible if media outlets were giving it...
~Dennis Junior~
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Comment number 2.
At 27th Jan 2009, jamesmcclellan wrote:I did not watch it through the link above, but it was streamed across the internet on AOL. The picture and audio matched up well, and there was only one time when the picture froze. Only for a quick second though.
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