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Inclusive Media Content

Media organizations that want to grow their audiences know that inclusive media is better media, making the content more popular, more shareable, and more useful. Whether you are sharing investigative journalism or cooking tips, if your audience members can't see or hear your content, it might as well not exist for them. The Access Hound team dissolves those artificial and unnecessary barriers between you and your audiences, allowing everyone to get the information and stories you want to share, growing your audiences in size, engagement, and overall satisfaction.

Let's make your stories more accessible
DESCRIBING: A horizontal color photograph. DESCRIPTION: The Silicon Valley and San Francisco chapters of the American Council of the Blind participated in field tests of the UniD apps in April 2018 at Muir Woods National Monument. The seven people shown here – including Park Ranger Michael Faw, in the middle of the image – are either looking at, or listening to, their mobile devices in a setting of enormous redwood trees. These trees are so large, only the base of the trunks can be seen. And one in the background looks as long as an automobile. Ranger Faw is holding a red smartphone and showing it to McGuire, who is leaning in toward the screen and holding a leash attached to a dark-gray poodle. Blind or visually impaired members shown here include Frank Welte, Sally McGuire, Michael Keithley, and Susan Glass. Two people, though, because of the way they are obscured in the image, could not be identified.

A group of a half-dozen blind and low-vision visitors are gathered at a viewpoint at Muir Woods National Monument in California to hear Audio Description as a part of a research project led by Dr. Brett Oppegaard.

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DESCRIBING: A horizontal color photograph. DESCRIPTION: Dr. Jordan Frith from Clemson University joined the research team in Honolulu to help conduct field research at Pearl Harbor National Memorial. Dr. Frith is framed in the center of this image around a dozen research participants. He is a white male, with a bald head, wearing sunglasses. He is describing to the group of research participants — as well as friends and family members serving as chaperones — how a Near-Field Communication Tag (NFC) works. For this experiment, our team placed a quarter-sized NFC tag on this map that could be accessed and heard via smartphones using the UniD mobile app. To use the tag, the listener just had to open the app, find the tag on the map, and place the phone on the tag. In this image, Dr. Frith is standing with the huge circular metal map about at his hip level. He is touching the map with his right hand and holding an audio-recording device in his left hand. Hawaii Association of the Blind members ring the table and are listening to the instruction, with more Pearl Harbor buildings and facilities, lined with trees, in the background.

Guest researcher Dr. Jordan Frith from Clemson University, in the right-center of the image in a white shirt, joined the research team in Honolulu to help conduct Audio Description field research at Pearl Harbor National Memorial.

Want more site visitors? Make more-accessible media

Making media accessible to the general public — regardless of a person’s sensory abilities — is a legal mandate that has been in place and reinforced in the U.S. for decades, starting with Section 504 and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and expanded by a variety of other key pieces of legislation or rulings, including the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, the 2010 ADA Standards for Accessible Design, and most recently, the final Department of Justice ruling on regulations of Title II of the ADA.

Build your audiences, too
DESCRIBING: A horizontal color photograph. DESCRIPTION: Autumn Cook, a U.S. National Park Service Public Affairs Specialist at Rock Creek Park, reads an audio description to a crowd of about a dozen people, including visitors from the American Council of the Blind and NPS coworkers. The description is about the horse activities at the park, and this performance is a test of the description's in-place effectiveness in communicating critical information to people who are DeafBlind, blind or who have low-vision. This representative group of audience members — with several holding white canes and at least four guide dogs present — is inside a large wooden stable at Rock Creek Park. Cook, who is a white woman, is wearing a traditional National Park Ranger uniform, with dark green pants and a khaki, short-sleeved and collared shirt, with the NPS logo on her left sleeve. She also is wearing a dark-green baseball hat, with the NPS logo on the front, and her wavy brown hair extends from beyond the hat down to her shoulders. Cook is looking at her phone and reading the description while most of the people in the crowd face her and listen intently. The large wooden barn has at least a dozen horse stalls in this image, and the photograph gives the impression that there could be many more available in this building and elsewhere on the grounds.

Autumn Cook, a U.S. National Park Service Public Affairs Specialist at Rock Creek Park, reads an audio description to a crowd of about a dozen people, including visitors from the American Council of the Blind and NPS coworkers, during a research field test.

Public Gathering Places, Private Ownership

Private companies of all sizes and scopes also have anti-discrimination legal requirements in place to ensure inclusion of all people in their businesses, regardless of sensory abilities. Thousands of media-accessibility lawsuits are filed every year, and the precedent-setting case against Domino’s pizza in 2019 illustrates the enormous legal and financial risks that companies have working outside of DEIA's political framings.

Reach legal compliance and more
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