Welcome to this exciting website for the Dean McGee Eye Institute (DMEI)! Since the dedication of our first building in 1975, DMEI has emerged as one of the nation’s largest and most respected eye institutes. The Institute, the University of Oklahoma Department of Ophthalmology, and our faculty and staff have been firmly committed to our multiple missions of patient care, vision research, education, leadership, and service. I invite you to explore this website to learn more about our heritage, people, programs, and world-class facilities. You will understand why we are so proud of our physicians and scientists, many of whom are national and international leaders; a vision research program ranked among the top in the nation with respect to funding from the National Institutes of Health/National Eye Institute and Research to Prevent Blindness; and residency and fellowship training programs that attract the best and brightest candidates from across the country. By offering such excellence, we can better serve all Oklahomans and the regional, national, and global communities. Again, welcome and enjoy!

Through research, Stovall and Harper learned that there are 13 million people in the United States who have visual impairments severe enough to limit their enjoyment of movies and television programming. They began to develop a plan to make programs accessible to visually impaired people by adding the voice of a narrator describing the visual elements of the story. Even though they knew nothing about the technology it would require to accomplish such a task, they began working with borrowed equipment to produce the first few narrative soundtracks. Stovall and Harper then planned to add the narrative soundtracks to the existing movie audio. Experts in the television industry told them their plan would never work, but unfailing in their tenacity, they eventually found someone who would help them try, and the videos came together just as they had expected. Less than one year later, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarded NTN with an Emmy for technology that has expanded the use of television.