Maps have become one of the Audio Description specialties of Access Hound. We have described hundreds and hundreds of maps of all shapes, sizes, and kinds. Just when we think we have seen it all, though, we get a map like the one we were asked to describe recently as a part of the Self-Guided Walking Tour brochure at Springfield Armory National Historic Site in Springfield, Mass.

This black-and-white map showed only the architectural outlines of several similar-looking buildings in a town square, in a rough illustrative form, like a pen drawing of the grounds, in linear perspective intended to give a 3D appearance. 

Some of the description challenges included: Most of these buildings did not have distinct architectural features, despite the emphasis on those features. They also mostly had numerical names, as in, there is a long rectangular building called No. 19 and next to it is the long rectangular building No. 32. Long rectangular building No. 28 is on the other side of No. 32, and No. 29 is an almost square little building across a wide courtyard, on the other side of the map. No. 31, also a little square, is about a half-dozen buildings away, near an ellipse. 

In other words, the naming structure did not really help with understanding the map audibly. Neither did the architectural emphasis. So what should we use as our organizing principle? 

First of all, like we do with all maps, we think about the purpose of the map; why was this map created and shared with audiences? We thought of it mostly as providing a cognitive map of the area of interest, meaning it was intended to show the scope of the larger site, with some possibilities for navigation around the site by this map. 

But more likely, we thought, the walking tour would be happening, and the map would be used as a reference tool for a stop, pulled out of a pocket now and again, rather than as the way in which a person actually navigated the site on the tour. For one innovation of this description, then, we received permission from the client to reorder the descriptions in numerical order to allow a person to easily seek that information, rather than follow along on a predetermined path from 19 to 32 to 28, and so on. That was the first audio structure we added to the description plan.

Every Access Hound project also includes people who are blind as co-designers of our descriptions, and in our discussions with those consultants, we noticed an interesting shape to the map that had possibilities for another audible structure to try. We know from experience that metaphors can be extremely helpful with descriptions, when they work, and they can be totally worthless, or worse, when they miss. But in this case, we thought the baseball diamond, as metaphor, could be helpful, because of its Americana foundation, because baseball on radio is a popular media type for people who are blind, and even if many people don't know much about the game, they still tend to recognize the shape of the baseball field from cultural references and usually can be oriented by that shape. So here is our attempt at a baseball metaphor for a map. What do you think about it? Does it work for you, personally? How else might you approach describing this type of map? 

DESCRIBING: A horizontal black-and-white illustrated map, showing outlines and locations of the buildings at the Springfield Armory National Historic Site. 

SYNOPSIS: This map of the Springfield Armory historic area shows a rectangular city center composed of one large city block, tilted onto a corner, at 45-degrees, creating a shape like a slightly stretched baseball diamond. This shift in linear perspective gives the three-dimensional appearance that the lower part of the diamond, where home plate would be, is closer to the viewer, and also larger in scale, like the batter and catcher might appear larger than the pitcher, and, in this case, the buildings in the lower corner appear larger than the buildings in the top of the diamond. There is no compass on this map, making it unclear which way is north and what other landmarks might be around. For this description, using the baseball diamond metaphor, consider a roughly square shape, standing on one of its corners, where there is the bottom corner, as home plate, the right corner as first base, the top corner as second base, and the left corner as third base.

IN-DEPTH DESCRIPTION: The streets that border this square of Springfield, Massachusetts are: Federal Street, which creates the frame of the lower left part of the diamond, between third base and home plate, State Street, the upper left of the diamond, between second and third base, and Pearl Street, the lower right of the diamond, between home and first base. The street that creates the upper right part of the diamond, between first and second bases, is unnamed. 

There is a large grassy area in the upper left part of the diamond, which would be just in front of a shortstop and third baseman, ringed by single-storied structures. Most of the buildings, including the multi-story buildings, are clustered in the lower right, between where the pitcher and the first baseman would be. Each building has been given a number, and those buildings are described below under labels with their number, in other descriptions. This visual map does not have those labels directly attached. The map itself has no other labels or key, either, meaning people need to read the rest of the text of the brochure to make sense of the map and the numbered buildings, flipping back and forth between pages. 

The buildings vary in size and layout, with some forming L-shapes, squares, or elongated rectangles. The numbered ordering of the buildings does not follow a consistent pattern. For example, building No. 1 is slightly outside of the main triangle on the map, in the upper right, where right field would be, and building No. 2 is just inside the diamond, across the street from it, but the next closest buildings to No. 2 are No. 10 and No. 13. Several buildings also are not numbered, and some numbers are missing. 

RELATED TEXT: Springfield Armory, 200 Years, 1794 - 1994