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Audio Description Production

The "Access Hound Way," focused on inclusion

Our mission is to promote widespread societal inclusion for people who cannot see or cannot see well through the ubiquitous integration of Audio Description. We have developed a comprehensive process for making such high-quality accessible media, which directly includes people who are DeafBlind, blind, or who have low-vision in all parts of the Audio Description creation, dissemination, and review processes.

The team’s leader, Dr. Brett Oppegaard, has been the principal investigator on multiple national grants related to media accessibility, with support for such research 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-supportive corporations, such as Google.

Most distinctively, the Access Hound team 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.

Let's make the world a more-accessible place
DESCRIBING: A horizontal color photograph. DESCRIPTION: The second virtual Descriptathon had a large support team working behind the scenes on it. This image shows a conference room in Crawford Hall at the University of Hawai'i, where most of the core group of Descriptathon administrators gathered to host the 28-team event. These eight people are sitting around a rectangular table. If you imagine the table as sort of a Daliesque clock, with Research Assistant Tuyet Hayes, in a bright pink shirt at the Noon position, the rest of the team, clockwise, is: Consultant Annie Leist, Consultant Sina Bahram, Developer Joe Oppegaard, Co-PI Thomas Conway, PI Brett Oppegaard, NPS Accessibility Coordinator Michele Hartley, and Research Assistant Phil Jordan. Everyone has a laptop in front of them and is busily working, except Jordan, who is standing next to Hartley and talking with her about a piece of paper he is holding.

The second virtual Descriptathon had a large support team behind it. This image shows a conference room in Crawford Hall at the University of Hawai'i, where most of the core group of Descriptathon administrators gathered to host the 28-team event. These eight people are sitting around a rectangular table. If you imagine the table as sort of a Daliesque clock, with Research Assistant Tuyet Hayes, in a bright pink shirt at the Noon position, the rest of the team, clockwise, is: Consultant Annie Leist, Consultant Sina Bahram, Developer Joe Oppegaard, Co-PI Thomas Conway, PI Brett Oppegaard, NPS Accessibility Coordinator Michele Hartley, and Research Assistant Phil Jordan. Everyone has a laptop in front of them and is busily working, except Jordan, who is standing next to Hartley and talking with her about a piece of paper he is holding.

DESCRIBING: A vertical color photograph. DESCRIPTION: From left to right in the foreground, Eric Bridges, American Council of the Blind's Executive Director, Doug Powell, a member of ACB’s Rehabilitation Task Force, and Pat Sheehan, Director of the 508 Program Office at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, use the UniD app to explore John Brown's Fort with U.S. National Park Service staff members at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park in West Virginia. In this image, the three ACB members are listening to their smartphones on the dirt patch outside of the fort. The fort – a one-room, single-story brick building – has three identical entry doors, each surrounded by an arch of window panes. Two of those doors are propped open for visitors to go in and out.

American Council of the Blind members gather at John Brown's Fort at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, to listen to Audio Description about the site.

The craft (and art) of Audio Description

Audio Description, from an artistic paradigm, contains layers of artistic expression. There is a source material, which typically has some artistic properties to it, like those of a photograph or an illustration or a map. From there, the AD of that source material can be thought of as a form of sound art, too, using human or synthetic voice. Yet as with any sound-art project, there typically also is a script, involving the art of writing, separately, and, there is the extremely complex artistry of remediation (and audiovisual translation) at play, too, which involves many creative decisions. And why not, let's take this whole concept back a few thousand years to a possible origin point, the ancient Greek term ekphrasis.

Ekphrastic poetry was a way to describe the words that brought to mind visual pieces of art in a time period when there was no other way to do it. There were no photographs, for example, in Athens of 500 B.C., so in Homer's epic story of "The Illiad," when the shield of Achilles was "shown" to listeners, that viewpoint came entirely through the lyrical phrases, produced by the bard, and processed by the ears, as these lines provoked the imagination:

Get descriptions with style and substance
DESCRIBING: A vertical color photograph. DESCRIPTION: A huge brass bell that was recovered from the USS Arizona after the attack on Pearl Harbor hangs in an outdoor gazebo at the national memorial. Research volunteer Anthony Akamine, left, stretches his right arm about as far as it can to touch the bell. There is a smaller recreation of the bell right below the big original, at about Akamineʻs stomach level, but he reached for the bigger bell after hearing Audio Description about it from Research Assistant Haruka Hopper, right, and then wondering if he could reach up above his head and touch it. Akamine is holding his white cane in his left hand while reaching up with his right arm. Hopper is standing close to Akamine, on his left, looks up at the bell, too. Akamine is wearing a dark blue collared short-sleeved shirt. Hopper is wearing a black t-shirt, and her long hair is kept on the top of her hard in a tight bun.

Anthony Akamine, left, and Research Assistant Haruka Hopper, examine a huge brass bell that was recovered from the USS Arizona after the attack on Pearl Harbor. After hearing the Audio Description of the bell, Akamine wanted to reach up and touch it.

A defintion of AD as well as redefinition

What is Audio Description? It's a remediation process during which visual media gets transformed into audible media, primarily for the benefit of people who are blind or who have low-vision, as a way to access visual information through sound.

But that definition just states a baseline need for the end product. A more-profound question is: What can Audio Description be? And that scope is only limited by the minds and talents of the describers.

Set the standard with your descriptions
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