About Us
Established in 2014, The UniDescription Project was founded by brothers Brett and Joe Oppegaard, with Brett, the university professor, with a Ph.D. in technical communication and rhetoric, providing the academic expertise on media-accessibility topics, and Joe, the computer programmer, with decades of experience running a tech company, providing the programming expertise and creating novel media-accessibility tools.
Together — and with a lot of help from a broad community of supporters around the world, especially within the U.S. National Park Service and the American Council of the Blind — the UniD team has led media-accessibility initiatives throughout the United States and also in other countries around the world seeking to make more-inclusive media, including the United Kingdom, Canada, and Italy.
Our mission is to co-create, with people who are blind, a more-accessible future by providing Audio Description training and production services, plus extremely useful Open Access, Open Source webtools that help users to audio describe any type of inaccessible visual media, including photographs, maps, charts, tables, brochures, wall texts, wayside signs, exhibits, etc., in a prompt and professional manner. Those descriptions also get heard and validated by representative members of the target audience before being released to the general public, keeping human sensibilities at the forefront of the production process.
Brett and Joe Oppegaard standing in front of the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C.
Testing Audio Description at Muir Woods National Monument, California.
About Our Name: UniDescription
In the late 1970s, designer Massimo Vignelli worked with Harpers Ferry Center staff to create the “Unigrid System,” upon which all National Park Service brochures since have been based. The self-described “information architect,” who also helped to design the innovative New York subway map, favored a modular system with a subtextual grid that facilitated order and consistency.
Our web-based project – with direct connections to Harpers Ferry Center, the National Park Service, those brochures, and those basic beliefs – has been called “UniDescription,” or “UniD” for short, in tribute. That name should be pronounced like “unity,” serving as both an abbreviation of the more wonky original label of “UniDescription” and as an inspiration for our mission, which is to:
Bring unity (through UniD) to the world of audio description.
About Our Team: Redesigners of a Better World
Audio Description is a necessary response to an inaccessible media environment, a situation where the visual media of a place really needs audible alternatives. We would all prefer that media ecosystems are built with accessibility and equity at the forefront of any design process. In the meantime, though, we will continue to retrofit as needed.
Brett Oppegaard
UniDescription Founder
Joe Oppegaard
Chief Technology Officer
Chris Matthias
Project Manager | Client SupportBetter Public Places
Collaborations with U.S. National Park Service Sites
Collaborations with other public places