Inclusive Media — The UniD Way
The UniDescription (UniD) team has been making accessible public media at the highest levels of legal and ethical conformance for more than a decade, including collaborations with about 200 national parks as well as other types of public attractions, including aquariums, botanical gardens, libraries, museums, nonprofit organizations, performing arts centers, public art collections, state parks, wildlife refuges, and zoos. Read more about where we’ve been and what we’ve done.
The team’s leader, Dr. Brett Oppegaard, who also serves as a Professor at the University of Hawai’i, 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. Read more in the UniDescription backstory.
Most distinctively, the UniD 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. With our higher purpose of making the world a more-accessible place, we use the financial support we receive on this project to build and freely give away robust Open-Access, Open-Source webtools aimed at improving Audio Description through production and dissemination software. We also create custom and innovative training workshops of all types.
Services Offered (What We Can Do For You):
- Legal & Ethical Compliance: We are experts in accessibility on the web. We will review your website not only with automated accessibility testing tools but also with actual screen readers on multiple platforms to make sure they pass the human test as well. Once we have identified the needs, our tech team is ready to dig in and update your code to meet the highest standards.
- Bring in Our Production Team: If you just want your media made accessible, right away, and not to worry about it, one of our Production Teams can rapidly be brought in to help. This group will create the high-quality accessible media you want and need and even verify results with your audiences.
- System Integration: Our tech team is ready to automate the integration of Audio Description into your website, digital asset management software, or custom app.
- Present One of Our Production Software Demos: We already give away free use of our robust Open Access, Open Source software (www.unidescription.org), which has been under intense development for more than a decade, but we also can provide hands-on demonstrations, customized tutorials, and mentoring services.
- Offer Staff Training: Our heavily lauded hackathon-like “Descriptathon” process for teaching describers to make better descriptions can be offered in various customizable workshop, lecture, or site-visit configurations.
- Support Research and Development: Led by Dr. Oppegaard, our research initiatives continually push the edges of what’s known about Audio Description, including unique validation techniques. In other words, did the descriptions work for its intended audiences? And in what ways? We can tell you, with empirical evidence. And if you would like to have specific research, like this, done, we can develop a customized plan based on your needs and aims.
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 UniD Research Assistant Haruka Hopper plays Audio Description about the bronze object on her smartphone.
The Origin Story of UniDescription
Michele Hartley, the Media Accessibility Coordinator for Harpers Ferry Center, the interpretive design hub of the U.S. National Park Service, gave this dynamic overview of The UniDescription Project at the Fedstival conference on Sept. 22, 2017.
Read and listen to more about the history of The UniDescription Project on the website that features our custom-built suite of Audio Description tools, UniDescription.org.
FAQs
The UniDescription Project began in 2014 as a research initiative at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, spearheaded by Dr. Brett Oppegaard. It was conceived with the goal of improving Audio Description (AD) services across various platforms and venues, particularly focusing on national parks to start. The project aimed to address the gap in accessibility for individuals who are blind or have low vision by creating and refining audio description techniques and technologies.
Funded primarily through grants from the U.S. National Park Service, the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, Google, and other supporters, the project has expanded its scope over the years. It now encompasses a wide range of activities including research, training workshops, the development of the UniD app, and hosting Descriptathons — events that combine competition, collaboration, and learning to produce high-quality audio descriptions.
UniDescription has made significant strides in making cultural and natural resources more accessible, producing audio descriptions for about 200 U.S. National Park Service sites. The project has also fostered a community of professionals and volunteers dedicated to advancing the field of audio description, making it a leading initiative in the realm of media accessibility.
Descriptions produced by the UniDescription team in the UniD Way undergo many levels of quality checks, starting with the formation of a production team that includes — as co-creators — people who are blind or who have low-vision. We also bring to this group appropriate Subject Matter Experts, well-established professional writers, and people who truly care about accessibility and inclusion. And, at the end of this production process, we have these descriptions reviewed by representative members of the target audience, who are blind or who have low-vision, to make sure we have satisfied these most important listeners.
The UniDescription Project was started as an academic initiative, meaning its foundations and strategies are rooted deeply in empirical studies on this topic as well as best-practice guidelines produced by the leading associations, organizations, and government agencies around the world. Its founder, Dr. Brett Oppegaard, is one of the most-innovative international scholars working in this area.
The UniDescription Project was created in the United States in 2014 and since has become the most-prominent Audio Description research project internationally to focus on the description of static visual media, such as photographs, charts, and maps. While most of the research about Audio Description in the world focuses on dynamic video or live events, The UniDescription Project addresses the need for the everyday accessibility of the static visual imagery that illustrates our public places, from wall signs to complex collages and exhibits.
Our entry point into this area is most often the brochure … the printed, foldable piece of paper that provides site orientation, history, context, etc. Without such foundational knowledge, a place is essentially unknowable to a visitor, and most public attractions do not even offer this fundamental step toward accessibility for people who are blind.
So the UniD team typically starts with the brochure. Makes that accessible. And builds from there, into the descriptions of wayside signs, exhibits, architectural signage, films, and anything else in a place that intends to communicate meaning via the eyes. We transform visual media into audible media, primarily for the benefit of people who are blind but with many side benefits as well for people who are low-vision, print dyslexic, and audio-oriented learners.
To-date, the UniD team has collaborated with about 200 national parks, plus a variety of other public attractions, including aquariums, botanical gardens, libraries, museums, nonprofit organizations, performing arts centers, public art collections, state parks, wildlife refuges, and zoos.
For more information about this topic, visit our free and online UniD Library, where you can find a curated collection of resources, research papers, and articles.
Want to make your public place more accessible?
The UniDescription team has the background, training, resources, technical expertise, production tools, and community support to help you to make your public place more accessible. We can create a customized plan and carry it out quickly and with a high degree of skill and competence. Just let us know how we can help you.