M+E Daily

At the Nov. 10 SoCal Women’s Leadership Summit, presented by Women in Technology Hollywood (WiTH), Michele Spitz of Woman of Her Word — a media producer, voiceover artist, and longtime philanthropist advocating for media accessibility and disability inclusion and awareness — will deliver the closing keynote of the event: “Broadening Your Diversity Impact.”

Her presentation will stress how equal audience access ensures entertainment and information remains an engaging, collective experience, one shared by all audiences on all exhibition and distribution platforms.

“As we continuously advance towards an evolving future and developing mindset, we aspire to consistently accommodate all communities inclusive of those individuals with language, cognitive, physical, hearing and visual differences,” Spitz said. “We become an ideal world when we simultaneously integrate our efforts, implementation and outreach yielding a universally beneficial outcome for all people.”

Spitz will share her experiences delivering broader access to content, as well as her call to action supporting the needs of diverse communities using technology. She’s been dedicated to selectively funding audio description postproduction accessibility grants to ensure media content is accessible to low-vision and blind audiences, and has nearly a decade of experience producing, narrating, consulting, and project managing audio description assets for film, broadcast, digital media, film festivals, museums, educational content, promotional and fundraising media.

Woman of Her Word funds audio description production for many of the 80-plus hand-selected media projects her company has aligned with.

The SoCal Women’s Leadership Summit is designed to inform, engage, and inspire attendees, with a focus on diversity, leadership, and technology issues, especially as it relates to the effects of the pandemic.

The half-day, closed-door event runs from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. PT, and will feature presentations and breakout sessions tackling the impact of bias, both human and algorithmic. The 2020 edition of the SoCal Women’s Leadership Summit saw more than 250 attendees, with more than 70 percent representing the media and entertainment industry and tech-adjacent companies. The event is sponsored by Sutherland, Premiere Digital, Solliance and Converge Technology Solutions.

For regular program updates, visit the event website here. To register, click here.

To sponsor SoCal Women’s Leadership Summit 2020, contact Evie Silvers at [email protected], or Garrett Finley at [email protected].