Audio Description Specialists, Making More-Accessible Places

Leadership, Software, and Training Earns National, International Awards

The Access Hound team offers the Audio Description training, resources, technical expertise, production tools, and community support you need to help you to make a more-inviting place for all people to use, including people who cannot see or cannot see well. We offer inclusion-building services ranging from staff training to media production services to high-level strategic consulting, available in fractional shares. How do you want to make your organization's media more-accessible? We will collaborate with you on innovative, detailed, and actionable plans aimed at improving workflows, eliminating backlogs, enhancing products, and developing your staff's skills and expertise in accessible media.

Book Access Hound Services

DESCRIBING: A vertical color photograph. DESCRIPTION: Inside a Pearl Harbor National Memorial exhibit space, from left to right, volunteer Anthony Akamine touches a tactile display of a World War II airplane bomber while Research Assistant Haruka Hopper plays Audio Description about the bronze object. In the background, on a wall-sized illustration, the same type of Japanese airplane can be seen dropping a torpedo into Pearl Harbor. Hopper has a Go Pro camera strapped to her body, with the camera facing forward and capturing Akamineʻs reactions to the media heʻs being provided at this location. Hopper also holds her smartphone in her right hand, about chest level on Akamine, just a few inches away from him, so he clearly can hear the description. Akamine is holding his white cane in his left hand and is touching the model airplane with his right hand, looking down toward the model.

Inside a Pearl Harbor National Memorial exhibit space, from left to right, volunteer Anthony Akamine touches a tactile display of a World War II airplane bomber while Research Assistant Haruka Hopper plays Audio Description about the bronze object on her smartphone.

Inclusive Media:
The Access Hound Way

The Access Hound team has been making accessible public media at the highest levels of legal and ethical conformance for more than a decade, including collaborations with more than 200 national parks as well as other types of major public attractions, including aquariums, botanical gardens, libraries, museums, nonprofit organizations, performing arts centers, public art collections, schools, state parks, wildlife refuges, universities, and zoos.

The team’s leader, Dr. Brett Oppegaard, a university professor who has earned the highest academic degree and highest academic rank, has been the principal investigator on multiple federal grants related to media accessibility, with support for his research and community outreach provided by the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts, and the U.S. National Park Service, as well as from accessibility-oriented corporations, such as Google.

The Access Hound team distinctively grounds its approaches to complex accessibility issues in the empirical research of Dr. Oppegaard and other world leaders in this area. In other words, we do not guess. We research and test. With our higher purpose of making the world a more-accessible place, we use a portion of the proceeds we earn on this project to build and freely give away robust Open-Access, Open-Source software and webtools aimed at improving Audio Description while building a greater global support system for media accessibility of all types, especially Audio Description.

Get to Know Our Team Better

DESCRIBING: A vertical color photograph. DESCRIPTION: Access Hound researcher Matt Bullen is standing next to collaborator Bob Cavanaugh of the Washington Council of the Blind, holding an audio recorder to capture his comments while Cavanaugh touches and explores an exhibit mostly outside of the photo frame. They are both shown from the waist up. Bullen is a white male, with short gray hair. He is wearing a collared white shirt. Cavanaugh is a white male, with short brown hair. He is wearing a white t-shirt, and blue sunglasses. He is smiling slightly and reaching out his right hand to touch a plexiglass box covering the exhibit. In his left hand, he holds his white cane handle close to his chest.

Access Hound researcher Matt Bullen, left, listens intently to collaborator Bob Cavanaugh of the Washington Council of the Blind as Cavanaugh explores an exhibit at the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park in Seattle, WA, describing his experiences with it, as a person who cannot see it, and ways those experiences could be improved.