This year WGBH created the first-ever described DVDs with audible menus: American Experience's Abraham and Mary Lincoln: A House Divided and Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas. "We want these DVDs to serve as a model to the industry for producing completely accessible DVDs for people with vision loss," Goldberg says. "We opened a new office in Burbank, California to further encourage Hollywood studios to caption and describe their latest films and to support MoPix, our captioning and descriptive technology that enables people with vision or hearing loss to enjoy first-run movies in theaters." WGBH's efforts are paying off: the blockbuster Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone premiered this past fall with closed captions and descriptive narration, and the number of movie theaters nationwide with MoPix technology increased by nearly 50 percent in 2001.

WGBH is doing more than making popular media available. "Children with disabilities face many challenges," says Media Access research director Mardi Loeterman. "Technology can serve as either a barrier or a bridge to learning.

We're collaborating with publishers and educational software developers to make sure they consider children with disabilities in their designs.

"We're also evaluating the effectiveness of the recently added second stream of 'edited' captions on our children's series Arthur," continues Loeterman, noting that captioning is available on all TV sets 13 inches or larger manufactured from 1993 onward, and also through set-top decoders. "The goal of edited captions, which are supplied in addition to the more familiar near-verbatim captions, is to help children who are not fluent readers have greater success reading captions and understanding the program. If the results support our hypothesis, this will provide a compelling argument for a second stream of captions on additional children's programs."

For 50 years, WGBH has worked hard to provide all Americans with access to the media. Today, technology finally is catching up with our aspirations and mission.