[ Italicized content represents actions to be taken ]
An animated spoken word poem is probably the most difficult media for which to add an audio description. Which is great... because if we can figure this out... we can audio describe anything! The more we discussed and brainstormed approaches for the audio descriptions, we realized that a sighted person can not likely make informed judgments about how a blind or sight impaired person experiences media. Their sensory perception, cognition and the way they experience the world are profoundly different from ours. I could not find any actual research studies on the topic. I suspect that the "best practices" that are published are merely guesses by sighted persons. So I decided to try everything we could think of and employ a variety of approaches. We will, over the course of the next several months, test the media with as many blind and sight impaired people that we can. We will use a consistent methodology, with a control, and write a formal report of our findings. We will share what we learned with the media industry with the aim to provide some clear guidance. Here are the approaches:
I think adding a visual description of the poet is a great addition to our list and I will make that happen for at least one, if not more of them.
Also, if we consider moving beyond accessible design and expand out to Universal design as an objective, we need to think about creating a single experience that works well and may even be a better experience for everyone. Imagine a sighted and blind person watching a video together. What does the perfect video look like for them? To answer that question, we are trying different writing and captioning approaches on other projects. I think we will likely fail often on the way to defining some successful, creative and tested universal design methods. But, that's how innovation works!
I love the animation for "I Am" by Alayna and "I Will Rise" by Zaniah! I think the students hit the spirit of the poems right on the dot. For the composite video, let's start with "I Am Home" and end with "I Am Music".
Titles of poems should appear in the animation exactly as students wrote them, which is how they're written on the back of the album. "I Am" by Alayna ("I Am Home" isn't the title of the poem as written by the student). "I Am" by Willa (the first line of the poem shouldn't appear in parenthesis after the title). It's totally fine if the file names need to be distinguished since several poems share the same title.
We will correct those!
"We Are Gold" contains some pretty egregious reinforcement of stereotypically gendered professions. The student likely didn't mean to do this, which would be a great spring board for talking about implicit bias and how vital it will be for each of them to fight structural/cultural biases in their work as designers/animators/humans.
It'd be great if the student could portray both genders doing all sorts of jobs and even better if there were men, women, and non-binary characters doing various jobs. Positively, the olympian and chef are pretty good examples of non-binary characters. It is also worth noting that, for jobs that aren't stereotypically gendered, the student chose to portray women: the artist, musicians, and person with a headset are all women. However, here's the list of the gendered professions in the animation (to be clear, these are not individually problematic; rather, the consistent portrayal along gendered lines is what's concerning):
Action..
It's interesting that the student that designed those people is a female. I feel like I should have caught this... I guess I''m learning too! I will approach the student and see if she would like to make some changes to the ones bolded in the list