What UniD Can Do For You:
The UniDescription research-and-development team has worked with about 200 national parks and other public institutions to train them and their staff members on writing high-quality audio descriptions, primarily for the benefit of people who are blind. The team also specializes in making public places more accessible, in general, including exploring combinations of tactile objects and Audio Description.
Volunteer participant Crata Mizutani, left, studies the shape of the USS Arizona Memorial building by touching a paper model of it provided by UniD researchers, including Research Assistant Kira Swearingen.
Training: Remote or In-Person
The UniDescription Project team has trained hundreds of federal government employees and other administrators and caretakers of public places for more than a decade in the art of writing impactful, accurate, and efficient Audio Description. These descriptions make public places more accessible and more inclusive to all.
Staff training options include:
- A half-day workshop (virtual, via Zoom)
- A full-day workshop (virtual via Zoom / or in-person
- Or a full hackathon-like Descriptathon experience. The Descriptathon is a roughly once-a-year, three-day collaborative workshop (synchronous via Zoom / or in-person) that also requires about 10 hours of online asynchronous prep from each participant. Typically, organizations will sponsor a team or two each year.
Descriptathons are special events that require 16 or 32 teams to participate. Each organizational team typically includes 3-5 staff members, but can include more (more than 10, though, gets a bit unwieldy); those teams will be provided with at least two additional external UniD volunteers and at least two representatives from the community who are blind or who have low-vision.
In a Descriptathon, each team member will get high-level training about Audio Description, both in general and in common genres, such as in terms of best practices for describing people, or objects, or maps. Each team will collaborate on practice descriptions as well as descriptions that are part of our friendly hackathon-like competition. At the end of the training, the team should have members well-educated in this area but also an audio-described project, such as an audio-described brochure, ready for public engagement.
Production: Getting descriptions done
If staff training is not the primary objective, and getting descriptions done in a timely manner is the imperative, then The UniDescription team is also ready and available to provide those services. We can describe collections as small as 20 images and as large as 25,000.
Production Workflow: All you have to do to get your images described is to provide us access to your collection online.
We will download the images, create a new project for the collection in our robust online system, bring together a group of describers to do the work, hire independent reviewers to check it, and then deliver the descriptions and their reviews directly to you in one easy-to-manage online interface.
We already can do a full pull and push migration of data from most archiving software systems, including ContentDM, which is commonly used in libraries.
The cost is calculated per image description and includes the creation of an original human-written description and one round of human-written revisions.
Networked Ease: System Integration (i.e., Connecting with ContentDM)
Public places use a variety of digital-asset management software packages to host their collections of images, such as ContentDM. The UniD team generally can connect directly with those, allowing us to download images in large batches and upload descriptions of those images in equally large batches.
ContentDM, for example, is commonly used by libraries, museums, government agencies, and other institutions to build, showcase, and preserve their digital collections online. The UniD team already has created code ready to connect to any ContentDM system that will quickly fetch images that need descriptions and send those directly to our describers and reviewers. Once the describers and reviewers are done with their part, our code can be easily modified — as long as we are allowed to use the appropriate security clearances — to upload the audio descriptions into the ContentDM database, making the world a more-accessible place through this new batch of audio described images.
API Integration (connecting your system, such as Content DM to UniD)
Legal Compliance: Make Your Full Site Accessible
Web laws and standards have been steadily increasing in sophistication in recent years, requiring deeper and deeper levels of accessibility, for all types of audiences.
For a status report, The UniDescription team can do a full review of your website or mobile app and document any variances from federal law requirements as well as industry best practices.
The UniD team can help your website reach full AA WCAG standards.
Accessible News: Make Journalism More Inclusive
News media organizations actively are seeking new audiences. Making more-accessible Journalism is an opportunity for the industry’s future. The UniD team can help any news organization to make more-accessible media throughout their site.
We offer customized plans for this type of work. Please contact us for more details.
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.