One of our regular collaborators — Jane-Charlotte Manley of the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) in London — recently wrote to me a reminiscence of a description she recalled from our Descriptathon 6 ... in 2020. That was a hackathon-like event (sponsored by the National Park Service, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Google, and others) that mostly focused on describing the visitor brochures around the National Mall in Washington, D.C., including many other memorials listed below. 

The detail that caught and stayed in Jane's mind was that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, with its glassy black walls, provided a "mirror-like" surface for people to face and potentially to see the names of the dead and themselves intertwined in the reflection of war and its aftermath. For people who cannot see, and were not told of that detail, this key interactive component of the memorial was simply not present and not available. Yet with the description, and with thought about it and its purposes, the words brought the idea to life in a profound way.  

When reading that kind note from Jane, I thought a lot about the power of that single description and its enduring nature, still in the mind of a person on the other side of the world, more than five years later. As an ongoing oral history project, we have collected many other stories about the impacts of our Audio Description efforts elsewhere, which provide testaments of the power, importance, and durability of high-quality descriptions. In other words, AD really does matter.

In this case, the photo itself was quite small and easy to overlook on the brochure. It set an everyday scene. But without the description that Jane mentioned, I don't think I would have given it much thought. Reading that description, though, engaged something in my mind (and in Jane's) about something deeper about what it was showing, what it was representing, and why it was there, giving us a view of the wall, using it in a way that many people use it, but illuminating it as a reflection of ourselves in the reflecting of the wall. That was a novel perspective for me to ponder, triggered by the text, and I didnʻt do it until I heard the description, which was, as follows: 

DESCRIBING: A small, vertical, color photograph of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. 

DESCRIPTION: Showing one side of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, as photographed from atop the other side, the top of this black granite wall is horizontal across the middle of the image. There are more than 30 vertical panels visible. There is a sense of engraved text in tight horizontal lines filling the space of each panel, but the names are not legible from this distance. The panels get longer from left to right. A walkway next to the wall slopes downward from left to right indicating that the memorial is sunken below the photographer's position. The wall is set into a grassy hill with an abundance of lush, green trees filling the background on a sunny day, with a road and moving cars in the background, beyond the trees. Five park visitors, all dressed in shorts and t shirts, face the mirror-like wall and read the names. There is a post and chain fence along the walkway, on the opposite side as the wall, about hip height to the figures standing on the path, aimed at keeping people from walking on the grassy area near the wall. In the foreground of the photo, the thin edge at the top of the second side of the memorial is visible as a diagonal line across the image, indicating that the photographer is standing on the top of the grassy hill above that side. The intersection of those two walls of the memorial is not visible in the photo but would be located to the viewer's right. 

CREDIT: NPS (Contributors to this project focused on making the National Mall in Washington, D.C., more inclusive were: Alyssa Baltrus, Amy Fedchenko, Ashley Luke, Beth Arnold, Beth Sciumeca, Bob Geyer, Justin Monetti, Kelsey Graczyk, Laura Illige Harvey, Nathan King, Susan Philpott, and many others).

RELATED TEXT: Maya Ying Lin conceived her design as creating a park within a park—a quiet protected place unto itself, yet harmonious with the site. To achieve this effect she chose polished black granite for the walls. Their mirror-like surfaces reflect the surrounding trees, lawns, monuments, and the people looking for names. The memorial’s walls point to the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. The 58,267 names are inscribed in chronological order of the date of casualty, showing the war as a series of individual human sacrifices and giving each name a special place in history. Lin said, “The names would become the memorial.” The names begin at the vertex of the walls below the date of the first casualty and continue to the end of the east wall. They resume at the tip of the west wall, ending at the vertex above the date of the last death (west wall shown at right). With the meeting of the beginning and ending, a major epoch in American history is denoted. Each name is preceded on the west wall or followed on the east wall by one of two symbols: a diamond or a cross. The diamond denotes that the individual has been declared deceased. The 780 persons whose names are designated by a cross were either missing or prisoners at the end of the war and remain missing and unaccounted for. If a person returns alive, a circle, as a symbol of life, is inscribed around the cross. In the event an individual’s remains are returned or are otherwise accounted for, the diamond is superimposed over the cross. Some Facts About the Memorial The walls are 246.75 feet long, and the angle at the vertex is 125°12’. There are 140 pilings; the average depth to bedrock is 35 feet. The height of the walls at the vertex is 10.1 feet. The granite comes from Bangalore, India; it was cut and fabricated at Barre, Vt. The names were grit blasted in Memphis, Tenn. The height of individual letters is 0.53 inch and the depth, 0.038 inch.

Our full Audio Description of that Vietnam Veterans Memorial brochure as well as other descriptions of national parks, including those around the National Mall in Washington, D.C., can be heard via the free UniDescription mobile app or via the web at UniDescription. The UniDescription Project is the academic-focused counterpart to Access Hound, including contributions from many of the same people.

If you want to take an AD tour of other descriptions from that collection that we created in the D.C. area at that time, in 2020, those include:

• Antietam National Battlefield
• Belmont-Paul Women's Equality National Monument
• Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial
• Ford's Theatre
• Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial
• Korean War Veterans Memorial
• Lincoln Memorial
• Martin Luther King Memorial
• Monocacy National Battlefield
• Thomas Jefferson Memorial
• World War II Memorial