Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Grant provides $25,000 for hearing aids

Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family Foundation gave the Massachusetts Commission for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing grant of $25,000 to help provide hearing devices and other assistive technology for deaf and hearing-impaired individuals who cannot afford to pay for them on their own.

The same foundation that gave WGBH $1 Million to support the public broadcaster's work in making media accessible to people with disabilities. WGBH's studio complex in Brighton named The Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family National Center for Accessible Media at WGBH. If anyone remembers, in the 1970s, WGBH made history when it developed captioning for deaf and hard of hearing TV viewers which began in Boston, MA and began television broadcasted first-ever captioned: an episode of WGBH's cooking series, The French Chef with Julia Child. WGBH is a pioneer and leader in educational multimedia and in technologies and services that make media accessible to the 36 million Americans who rely on captioning or video descriptions.

2 comments:

Lisa Emrich said...

That's really cool! I hope that other businesses and organizations follow their lead. Some 50 or so people are going to be very thankful.

Diane J Standiford said...

Awesome. I wish to be rich to do such things with money.