Last night during the M-Enabling Summit the FCC's Chairman, Ajit Pai, announced the winners of this year's Chairman’s Awards for Advancement in Accessibility. These awards provide the opportunity to give recognition to notable innovations, improvements, and initiatives in accessibility that were introduced into the market during 2019.

You can do your part to make the web more accessible by adding descriptions to your social media images. We join the eighth Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) by showing you how to add descriptions to the images you publish in 3 social media websites. 

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will host a forum regarding the use of Enhanced Electronic Newsroom Technique (ENT) procedures for live captioning of local news programs. The forum will be on Friday, May 10, 2019, from 1:00 p.m. to 4:45 p.m., Eastern Time. It will be webcast with open captioning at www.fcc.gov/live.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is preparing a report to Congress to inform about the availability, use, benefits and cost of video description. The Commission is asking TV stations and broadcast networks, multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs), providers of video description, consumers of video description and anybody related to this topic to provide their feedback.

Have you ever wondered how people who are deaf-blind communicate among themselves? There are diverse communication methods that use, for example, variations of sign language, tactile alphabets or Braille displays. The disadvantage of those methods is that most of them require of an interpreter and the methods themselves limit the spontaneity of a conversation. That started to change in 2007, when a group of deaf-blind people in Seattle thought of a way of interacting directly among themselves. 

Since last year, Canal 22 Internacional offers a programming slot with accessibility on Saturdays and Sundays. To promote it, the station has launched a video clip showcasing the accessibility features in action.  Ricardo López, a fantastic member of our advisory group, who is deaf and works at the Model Secondary School for the Deaf at Gallaudet University, joined the effort by bringing ASL to the table. Now the video clip es accessible for all! 

Last month Dicapta Foundation's development team visited the Helen Keller National Center for Deaf-Blind Youths & Adults (HKNC) for a new training session of our GoCC4All technology. GoCC4All is a solution that integrates hardware and software to deliver TV captions to a Braille display. 

We are honored to have Maria Victoria Diaz, Dicapta's President, appointed for a second term with the FCC's Disability Advisory Committee (DAC). The DAC provides advice and recommendations to the Commission on a wide array of disability matters specified by the Federal Communications Commission.

G3ict The Global Initiative for Inclusive Accessibility of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTS) released its Digital Accessibility Rights Evaluation (DARE) Index 2017-2018 last month. The index measures the progress made by the 177 countries, that signed the 2006 Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), in promoting and implementing digital accessibility.