Our Advisory Group Meeting 2016
On June 8th and 9th, we held the annual meeting with our fantastic advisory group for the project “Captions and Video Description: Educational Tools for Hispanic Children with Disabilities,” #H327C150009. As always, it was a fruitful event that generated new ideas and commitments. It was also a moment to strengthen the friendship bonds with the group of people who are generous collaborators in our initiatives.
We introduced two new members to our advisory group: María Teresa Velasco, who is the Education and Inter-Institutional Relations Manager for Discovery Networks Latin America/US Hispanic; and Jaclyn Packer, who for the past 20 years has been involved with research about video description for people with visual limitations. María Teresa leads the project, Discovery en la Escuela, whose tools we are integrating into our project to offer training to teachers. Jaclyn is doing a research project about the benefits of video description in Spanish. We feel very honored to have the two of them in our group.
The people from Dicapta made several presentations including: the objectives and expectations for this new project; the role of our advisors in the evaluation of the educational content of the programs we are making accessible; the workshops we are offering; and the project’s website.
Dr. Juanita Rodriguez, the project’s research director, gave us an update on the status of the training of the special education teachers in Puerto Rico. After the training is complete, there will be a follow-up with the teachers to document the impact of the use of the accessibility tools on the acquisition of reading and writing skills of children with visual limitations.
We also had the participation of Margaret Barrera, Director of Special Education, Region One Education Service Center in Texas. Margaret discussed the diagnosis of the population of children with visual and hearing limitations that her office serves and the challenges that her office faces. We are excited to start working with Margaret, especially as Texas is one of the states with the highest percentage of Hispanic children.
Jason Stark, Director of Described and Captioned Media Programming (DCMP), was also with us. He introduced us to the phenomenal services that DCMP offers to those who have visual and hearing limitations as well as their families and teachers. Nancy Bloch and Betsy Sotillo from the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind gave us considerable information about school activities and the program English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL). The school serves about 600 students on campus. In addition to academic instruction, the school provides many extracurricular activities including athletic, artistic, and career development. During the academic year 2015-2016, the ESOL program served 38 students from very diverse backgrounds.
We had a roundtable with our 3 “cable-friends” HITN, Semillitas, and Discovery en la Escuela. We talked about the barriers to spreading the availability of accessibility services and the opportunities that we can take advantage of to promote them.
We enjoyed very much a couple of activities that took us out of our comfort zone. First, our advisor Dean Lermen challenged us to paint an object that we felt while we were blindfolded. This brought out the artistic side in some of us and we all enjoyed the experience of exploring shapes.
Then, Judy Matthews and Carol Colmenares guided us through an usual scavenger hunt. Before we started, Judy provided us instruction on how to use a cane and how to offer help respectfully and politely to a blind person. After that we began our search either blindfolded or wearing low vision simulators. The images tell it all!
Thanks to all who were present during our meeting. It was a pleasant and productive time.