Kate M. Sonkais the Executive Director of Teach Access and the Assistant Director of Academic Technology at the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. She holds a M.Ed. in Bilingual/Bicultural Education and a TESOL certificate from DePaul University. She improves teaching and learning with technology through course design and support, experiential learning, and training and mentorship for faculty members and students. Her scholarly areas of interest include disability, accessibility, second language acquisition, the role of language in identity development, and the intersection of accessibility and experiential learning.
Kate’s teaching experience includes a first-year writing course for non-native English speakers; a study abroad about language acquisition and global English in China; a study away to Los Angeles where students explore and meet leaders in the film and creative industries; and a study away to Silicon Valley where students engage and build relationships with tech companies around accessibility.
Larry is Senior Director and Head of Accessibility at Verizon Media. In this role, he directs a dedicated team of accessibility professionals and coordinates with thousands of designers and developers to ensure that Verizon Media’s many products, services and media offerings are as accessible as possible to people with disabilities. Verizon Media brands (Yahoo Finance, News, Sports and Lifestyle; Huffington Post, Engadget, Tech Crunch, Makers, AOL, and many others) all have mobile apps and websites that are designed and developed to conform to the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The brands also produce dozens of daily original programs – virtually all of which are captioned – and provide captions for thousands of partner videos, including content from Bloomberg, Fox Business News, AP, Reuters, MLB, NFL, Conde Nast, the Discovery networks and more. The Verizon Media Accessibility Team also supports major industry-wide efforts to raise the level of accessible technology awareness and understanding, as well as depiction of people with disabilities in the media, through projects such as The Disability Collection, Teach Access and XR Access.
Larry joined Verizon Media in June of 2014, having previously worked at WGBH Boston, where he founded and directed its National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM). NCAM focused on research and development, public policy initiatives and strategic partnerships for global impact on inclusive media and technology. Larry was directly involved in such ground-breaking legislation as the TV Decoder Circuitry Act, The Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act. He led efforts to create standards adopted by media organizations and the FCC to implement legislated mandates for accessible technology.
Before starting NCAM, Larry directed WGBH’s Media Access Group and its Caption Center and Descriptive Video Service. He holds a patent for “Rear Window,” a theatrical movie captioning system, and developed the market for captioning in movie theaters.
Larry majored in Cinema Studies at SUNY Binghamton and received a BA with honors in Broadcast Journalism from the University of Southern California.
