UniDescription Project

American Audio Description: Past, Present, and a Future of Accessibility Affected by Artificial Intelligence.

This presentation grounds the listener in the rich and varied history of American Audio Description, as a world leader in accessibility now turning its ground-breaking practices from the human-oriented analog experiences of the 1970s toward mass-networked Artificial Intelligence options, and everything in-between, including experiments in Audio Description as sound art. Results from recent research projects in this area will include comparative examples of description created in a utilitarian style versus an artistic style, and also comparative examples of human-created versus Artificial Intelligence-created descriptions.

Learning Outcome 1: Participants will learn and understand the distinct and important place that United States accessibility pioneers have had in developing Audio Description practices and research.

Learning Outcome 2: Participants will learn and understand best practices of describing people.

Learning Outcome 3: Participants will evaluate the differences between a utilitarian style of Audio Description and an auteur approach to the same material. 

Learning Outcome 4: Participants will evaluate the differences between a human-created description of a person and an Artificial Intelligence version of that description of the same material.

Susan Glass, an American Council of the Blind member, is raising her arms above her head and stretching out her hands in response to the audio prompt in UniD's The Presidio: Goldsworthy Walk project on her UniD app. She is holding her smartphone in one of her raised hands and closing her eyes to listen to the audio. She has a paper medical mask on – as a pandemic preventative in September of 2021. The mask has been pulled down under her chin for this moment. The audio prompt is asking her to imagine how tall the Spire artwork is, not shown here, by imaging her size, in the thick forest setting, and projecting herself in size up into the air several times. Glass is accompanied by her yellow lab guide dog, Omni, who is equipped with a handled harness. The dog – who actually has latte-foam-colored cream fur rather than yellow – is standing in front of Glass, sniffing the ground. Glass is a white, middle-aged woman, wearing a jacket and jeans, with a purse strapped around her shoulder. The jacket is monochrome, in all blues. But it also is decorative, with high-contrast horizonatal striping, ranging from light blues and aqua shades to dark blues. A line of logs creates a border on the ground behind her, separating the flat dirt path she is on from the dense forest. No foliage can be seen on most of the trees, which creates a background of vertical tree trunks. The trees are not large but plentiful. There is one small pine tree, about the height of a person, and a few leaves on the ground, but the forest is mostly a gray tone, created by the lack of color in the tree trunks.

Courtesy of Ernst Karel.