Verbit, along with its media arm, VITAC, hosted an inaugural customer award ceremony to recognize and celebrate customers who are inspiring us and moving the accessibility needle forward at their institutions and organizations. We polled our team and pulled data to select 10 prestigious award winners. These individuals showcase their commitment to accessibility and inclusion on a daily basis.
During the award reveal, Tom Livne, Verbit’s Founder and CEO, and Adi Margolin, Director of Product Management, also spoke to share exciting product updates and features for customers to look forward to in the coming months. A distinguished TEDx speaker, disability advocate and author, Lisa Cox also gave inspiring remarks. As a professional with disabilities, Cox emphasized the vital role that diversity and inclusion efforts and technology have had on her life and on the lives of countless others globally. She highlighted the importance of companies prioritizing accessibility efforts, as well as how having solutions like captioning can make a substantial difference.
“You’re doing far more than providing a service, you’re allowing many of us to work, to have an education,” said Cox. “I’ve gone back to study, and I could not have done that without things like captioning and all of those sorts of services.”
Here are some memorable moments and empowering messages from the award ceremony.
Revealing Our 10 Award Winners
The award ceremony focused on customers and teams who have demonstrated a true commitment to accessibility and inclusion. The winners range from those disrupting the higher education space to those working for major news and sports networks. Verbit’s Senior Customer Support Manager, Spencer Kirschner, and VITAC’s VP Sales, Sports, Deb Restall, moderated and announced the 10 winners. The list includes individuals and organizations that take pride in creating inclusive content, experiences and environments.
1. Above and Beyond Award: Penn State
Phillip Voorhees, IT Manager III, IT Accessibility Team at Penn State, stood out for his unwavering dedication to infusing accessibility into the university’s programs, including spearheading the integration of Verbit with Kaltura for seamless user experiences.
“On behalf of Penn State and myself, I thank you for this extraordinary honor and for helping us continue our efforts toward a culture of access,” Voorhees said upon accepting the Above and Beyond Award.
2. Best Collaborator: New England Sports Network (NESN)
NESN continues to collaborate with VITAC, Verbit’s media and sports arm, on several important initiatives. NESN’s team participated in the first pilot of Verbit’s new technology, ASR+, an enhanced form of automatic speech recognition, and on another recent design project. NESN is the broadcast home of the Boston Red Sox and Boston Bruins and has been working with VITAC for more than 20 years.
“As a sports network, NESN has grown in a number of ways, large and small,” said Cummings who accepted the award on behalf of the team. “Throughout our development, VITAC and Verbit have been by our side along the way, and we really appreciate the partnership and business relationship that has grown.”
3. Biggest Growth Star: Le Confessional
Charles Rivard and La Confessional, an independent sound post-production studio based in Montreal, were selected due to the company’s incredible growth trajectory. Their growth in captioning efforts with our Canadian team is nothing short of astounding – a 623% increase from 2021 to 2022, followed by a 133% increase from 2022 to 2023, resulting in an overall surge of 1,517%!
“We’ve grown a solid working relationship, and this partnership helped my company to offer a complete bundle of services to our clients, and create a one stop shop in audio post-production,” Rivard said.
4. Media Accessibility Trailblazer: Richard Orrell-Jones
Richard Orrell-Jones, VP of Business Operations at a major multinational news channel, has been a wonderful collaborator and supporter of closed captioning for nearly two decades. He has always recognized the importance that programming must have the highest quality and accurate captions in order to be accessible for all viewers. Orrell-Jones takes it upon himself and partners with VITAC to support that need.
5. Sports and Event Venue of the Year: Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse
Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse has been a VITAC customer for 10 years. The venue is home to the Cleveland Cavaliers and Cleveland Monsters. Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse is truly committed to making every event accessible.
Matt Eck, Sr. Director Events & Executive Producer, accepted the award on behalf of his team. He shared some of the efforts the stadium has been involved in this year, including working with the Cleveland Hearing and Speech Center, which gave them feedback on how to improve their accessibility.
“Our venue has really been trying to be as inclusive as possible in a number of demographics and we really turned our sites to this domain earlier this season,” said Eck. “This is only step one of working with you guys [VITAC]. We also are independently closed captioning all of our videos on our main board.”
6. Accessibility Allstar of the Year: Mark Turits of Paramount and CBS
Mark Turits, VP of Captioning and Video Description for Paramount Global and CBS has been a driving force in advancing accessibility in programming, making him the ideal candidate to be named Accessibility Allstar of the Year. Turits has earned “hero status” in the community for his many accessibility accomplishments over his 28 years with CBS. Turits has helped to promote bilingual captioning in English and Spanish dialogue and lyrics and spearheaded live audio description for the Grammy Awards and Tony Awards.
“This is recognition for what we do every day at Paramount Global in bringing our content to consumers who rely upon closed captioning and audio description,” said Turits. “Everything we do is made possible through the diligent and dedicated efforts of many, both inside Paramount Global and at our top-notch outside access service providers, such as VITAC, and others, all of whom work 24/7, 365 days a year to serve our consumers.”
7. Government Accessibility Leader of the Year: Gary Morin of the National Cancer Institute
Gary Morin, Office of Communications and Public Liaison, of the National Cancer Institute is an avid champion within his organization, advocating for what is right and maximizing accessibility. He is a vocal advocate of event accessibility.
“My passion is around providing accessibility so that it improves the work life for people with disabilities,” said Morin. “Ensuring our multimedia and our public information is accessible to everyone can work towards alleviating healthcare disparities, whether that’s because videos aren’t audio described or they aren’t captioned or captioned well.”
Morin said someone recently thanked him for making “accessibility not scary.” He went on to say that partners like Verbit are helping to make “accessibility accessible to people who aren’t familiar with accessibility.”
8. Inclusion Advocate of the Year: Laura Soto-Barra of NPR
Laura Soto-Barra, VP of Research Archives and Data Strategy at NPR, was named “Inclusion Advocate of the Year” for her unwavering commitment and consistent emphasis of the significance of high-quality transcripts in ensuring that NPR’s daily content reaches and resonates with a diverse audience. By prioritizing accessibility, Laura has paved the way for the Deaf and hard-of-hearing communities, along with individuals who might be navigating English as a second language, to fully engage with all of NPR’s offerings.
“We are committed to accessibility at NPR,” said Soto-Barra. “We are mostly audio media, so we see transcripts as a DEI device for our audience.”
She said that with a weekly audience of 43 million people, the need for quality transcripts is high, and she is selective about who she trusts to perform this work.
“I know a good company when I see it,” Soto-Barra said. “Many companies produce transcripts, but our company wants our transcripts to be at 99% accuracy. We know this is important and we know we can get this with you.”
9. Education Technology Partner of the Year: Levi Reid of Management Concepts
Levi Reid of Management Concepts became the prime candidate for the Education Partner of the Year Award because of his unwavering commitment to today’s learners by consistently striving to deliver accessible educational experiences to them. His proactive engagement extends beyond that, as he also actively contributes valuable product feedback to Verbit’s team and has a genuine dedication to continuous improvement.
10. Inclusive Learning Champion: Mark Nichols of Virginia Tech
Virginia Tech’s Senior Director for Universal Design and Accessible Technologies, Mark Nichols is an exceptional partner, a passionate leader and an advocate for inclusive learning. He created a campus-wide initiative titled “Keep CALM and Caption On” to drive accessibility forward at the institution. “CALM” is an acronym for “Choose Accessible Learning Materials,” and his effort and campaign is now active at other universities and schools in the region, making it even more impactful.
“Verbit’s been a fantastic partner in helping us grow that initiative and to build awareness,” said Nichols.
While accepting the award, Nichols also pointed out that accessibility efforts must extend beyond the identified disability community and become part of a broader strategy to embed Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles to provide learners with more choice.
Part of Virginia Tech’s strategy is “understanding the universal benefits of providing accessible services to anyone who benefits from them, not just exclusively individuals who choose to self-identify and receive specialized supports,” he said.
Join our Customer Community of Accessibility Advocates
Members of Verbit’s and VITAC’s teams are exposed to and helping to contribute to incredible work being done to make media, universities, work environments and stadiums more inclusive. If you’re looking for a place to start or to expand on your existing efforts, reach out to us. We’re happy to share more information on our captioning, transcription, audio description and translation technologies to help you in your work. You can also read more information here about Verbit’s existing customers and partnerships.