(upbeat music)
Welcome to "Hadley Presents".
I'm your host, Ricky Enger, inviting you to sit back, relax,
and enjoy a conversation with the experts.
In this episode, Dr. Brett Oppegaard joins us
to talk about the UniDescription project.
Welcome to the show, Brett.
Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
Yeah, I'm really happy to have you on the show
because this is something
that I've only recently discovered myself.
So the UniDescription project is an accessible app
that contains audio descriptions
of a lot of these historically significant places,
like national parks, museums, monuments, things like that.
Places that people like to tour
and really learn a lot about.
Now that things are starting to open up a little bit,
people are ready to explore again,
and so this is what I think is so cool about this project
is that whether you are exploring this from your home
and just getting an idea of what you missed
even though you're not traveling there.
Or maybe you are going on vacation
and you want get an idea of what is at these museums
and parks and such.
Rather than not having anything at all
other than the people with you describing things
that's what's so amazing about this project.
So yeah, I love the concept
and really happy to share this with the word.
So really before we jump into that,
why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are
and what you do?
Sure, yeah, I'm glad you discovered us.
We have actually been around since 2014.
I'm an associate professor at the University of Hawaii
and I do a lot of research
on what's called "Locative Media,"
which is the connection of content
and information to place through mobile technologies.
So in 2014, the National Park Service,
who I'd worked with before,
came to me with this problem, that "We have these brochures,
which are called 'UniGrid brochures',
and we wanna make those accessible to people
who are blind or low vision.
Can you help us with that?"
And that set us on this odyssey
that we've been on for the past seven years
to figure out how to do that.
And that's really involved a variety of steps,
but the initial one was to create open-access
and open-source web tools to allow for people to learn
about audio description and to make audio description
and then we created free mobile apps
to disseminate the audio description once it was made
and then we spent a lot of time just really investigating
and researching how to make better audio description
as a part of this.
Awesome. I love the whole approach to this.
Both from the perspective of you are able
to create a material to teach people
how to describe things,
and then, of course, there is the described material.
When I was checking out the website,
I could so relate to the backstory
of being at a historic site
and there's nothing described there
and so the people around you are, "Ooh."
"Ah." "Oh, wow, this is so fascinating."
And as a blind or low-vision person,
it's not the most exciting thing to happen.
And I love your motto, kind of a goal,
which is to describe the world. (chuckles)
You know, that shouldn't take too terribly long,
I would think.
You have to start somewhere.
So what exists right now?
What are the kinds of materials
that are available for people that have been described?
Yeah, well, to go along with your story,
I interviewed people who are blind or low vision
and ask them about their experiences
in different public places, including national parks.
And they would get a lot of stories,
kind of like what you say, the "oohs" and "ahs"
but "I don't know what's going on."
Or I had one person that told me, they went to Gettysburg,
and "It felt like I was driving around a parking lot
for hours, you know, 'cause it's just an auto tour."
And so we really, really wanted to focus first
on just the orientation part of coming to a site,
like what is there and what's available.
By focusing on the brochures,
those usually give a great overview
and that gives people who are blind
or low vision some agency to say,
"Well, I read in the brochure
that this, that, or the other thing's available
and that's what interests me,
so that's what I would like to do."
Instead of the situation that most people ended up in,
which was, you know,
"I've come along with my family and friends,
they pick everything.
You know, I'm a good sport about it,
but I'm not really having a great time."
And so we really wanted to change that dynamic
and give people to begin with the basic orientation,
like, "Why is this site important?
What is it about? What are its highlights?"
And then that gives people agency to start
to choose the agenda for the day
and to start to ask questions about, like,
"What's accessible here, you know?"
That becomes a major part of the planning
instead of getting there and everyone's kinda disappointed.
So I know that there are a number of things,
so like national parks and other historic sites
where the brochures have been described.
How do people actually access the material once it is there?
So we have free mobile apps on the Android
and iOS markets
and you can just search for UniDescription,
U-N-I Description, and those will pop up
and you can download those
and open them on your smartphones.
And they're heavily tested for accessibility.
And basically, once we do our training,
once the staff and volunteers
and people in the community of,
usually American Council of the Blind,
but sometimes Blinded Veterans Association or Helen Keller.
As soon as all of that comes together
and they've co-created this wonderful description,
then we push it into this UniDescription mobile app
that's free, anybody can download.
It's geo-located, so you can search for things near to you
or you can just search key terms
of things you're interested in.
And on that app, this point,
we have more than 130 US National Park Service sites,
plus Fish and Wildlife sites, and other places of interest.
Including the Statue of Liberty, the Washington Monument,
Yellowstone National Park, Yosemite National Park.
I mean, just all sorts of things
that you might be interested in
related to our shared American culture.
And now you can hear the description of those things.
That's become very powerful for people.
One of our primary volunteers lives about a mile away
from Minuteman National Park in the Boston area
and she'd lived her whole life there,
but never went to the park.
And then once the descriptions were made of that park,
she started to go there and just was having a great time.
So that's the kind of success stories
that we really base our merit on.
I love that story and I can relate to that
as well.
When I first got the app, I searched for the sites in D.C,
and, like, the Washington Monument.
I had taken a high school band trip
and it stood out in my memory
as being one of the most boring things I'd ever done
and having the opportunity to then go back
and get some of those descriptions
and put it together with, you know, "I was there."
And now many years later,
I'm actually able to experience the history of that.
So it's very cool.
How do the sites get chosen?
So how do we know what venues are being described
and how is that all brought about?
Yeah, it's a really interesting experience
you mentioned
about the Washington Monument
because we found that not only does the audio description
help people when they're on-site,
it also helps with planning,
and it also helps with memory of the experience.
That's something I don't think has really been addressed
very well in the research
and that's part of what I've been working on.
But the audio description, particularly of a brochure,
because it's not necessarily about the site experience,
it's more about the site itself,
the brochure really helps the people conceptualize
and build a mental image
of what they're going to be experiencing.
So you may have went in the Washington Monument
and not known about all the different gifts
that each state had given to it
on the way up the elevator or something like that
because nobody articulated that to you,
but then you might read later that,
"Oh, my gosh, when I went up that elevator,
there was a whole bunch of cool stuff
that every state had given a different thing as a tribute."
That creates this dynamic of memory-building.
It also creates a dynamic for planning.
And in terms of who can participate in this,
we're fully grant-funded.
There's no cost for producers or audiences.
So basically, when we have the grant funds,
we do more of it and we do as much of it as we can.
So if a site wants to participate,
whether that's a museum or a national park
or a wildlife refuge.
We work with any public place
and a place where people are going to want
to have shared communal experiences
with their friends and family.
Those are the primary places we focus on.
That's excellent.
And if you are someone who is blind or low vision
and maybe you're planning a vacation
or you kind of want to relive one that you've taken already,
but something isn't yet described,
are there ways that people can encourage these venues
to begin to describe these things or how does that all work?
Yeah, I think this is one of those
classic examples
of if nobody pushes for accessibility,
that probably won't happen.
So if you want your special place to be accessible,
I think it's important to ask the people,
the staff that work there, the leaders of it, to say,
"Can you please help us get this to be more accessible?"
And that could include a lot of things.
It could include, you know, ramps, tactiles,
braille, any number of things.
But in terms of UniDescription,
it's pretty much as simple as sending me an email
and saying, you know,
"Our organization would like to participate in this.
When you get a chance, can you fit us in?"
And then as soon as we get the grant funding to do that,
we'll try to include as many people as we can.
That's great.
And since it is grant-funded,
it means that all of this is free
to those who are experiencing the description.
There's kind of an interesting process,
right, for when something has been funded.
Can you talk a little bit about Descriptathons?
We built our open-source,
open-access tools in the beginning
and just handed it to national park people
and found out that some people would be real good
at creating description
and other people would really struggle at it
and there was, you know, just a very difficult transition
from being totally non-accessible to learning
how these tools worked to making an audio description,
which is, you know, complicated on its own,
and then to delivering it to the public in different ways.
So we created this event called a Descriptathon,
which is basically our idea is to bring together
staff at public places
and volunteers for those public places.
So not paid staff members, but volunteers.
And then people in their audience of that site,
so, you know, people in the community
who are blind or low vision,
and then putting them all together on a team and saying,
"Here's a brochure that we want to make audio described
and accessible at the end of this three-day workshop.
We'll train you on these genres of description.
We'll give you the tools and train you on the tools
and we want to see if you can figure out
how to make this happen."
And like I said, it's more than 130 places
have been able to put that together
in a very short amount of time
and make their sites more accessible.
We know it's possible.
We know it's something that just takes a little bit
of elbow grease and engagement and commitment.
And if everybody could do that at every place,
we'd have a very accessible world.
I love that.
And it's happening more and more every day,
so it's a wonderful thing to see.
And I like that blind and low vision people
are a part of this
because if you're creating something
and it doesn't really serve the audience
that it was intended to serve,
we probably have, you know, wasted a bit of time
and maybe not made something as good as it could be.
So yeah, I love that blind
and low-vision people are involved.
And I also like that on your site,
you have sort of tools and templates that talk about,
"If you're a describer,
these are some things that you should think about."
How did all of that come together?
Was it a process that you created the tools
sort of as you went
and you were learning along with everyone else
and decided to compile that and share it with others,
or how did this library and template
of this is how you describe things come together?
Originally, when we were asked to work on
this project,
we were given a box of about 400 brochures
and just said, you know, "Can you make this happen?"
And what we started to first investigate was,
"Are there any tools out there
to use for audio description?"
We had the expertise in accessibility.
We had the expertise in writing,
but we didn't have any way to build description
and then get it to people.
So our first few years,
we primarily spent designing the web tool.
And what we found in that process
was that there are some best practices
descriptions out there
and when we discovered those,
we wanted to share those with other people.
So that actually means that people can go to
your website
and learn about all this,
whether or not they're training directly with you.
Yeah, absolutely.
They can go to the UniDescription website,
create a free account, build a project,
disseminate the information however they want,
and never talk to us, if they feel real comfortable.
You know, there's enough there
in terms of background material and best practices.
And we publish our research there,
so you can read our research.
So all of that is designed to create
the infrastructure for description and let people do it.
But then the Descriptathon is a way to kind of bring energy
to that effort and get people excited about it.
Another thing I'll say is when we first started
creating descriptions on our tool.
Although we worked with people who are blind or low vision,
they weren't a part of the teams in the beginning.
They were more along the lines of reviewers or assessors.
And we just felt like it would be better to have
those people involved with the process from the beginning
as the drafts are getting created all the way through
rather than just being a judge at the end of the process,
like, "Did you do a good job or not?"
And once we made that switch,
the quality of our descriptions just improved dramatically,
I guess, is the best way to put it.
It started to have people on the teams
ask themselves more questions
because they had a face and people they talked to
that they knew were going to be listening to this.
And then the people in the ACB or BVA or Helen Keller,
they would ask really great questions to their teammates
and that would prompt these rich discussions
and it would just all lead to better descriptions.
So that co-creation model, something we've committed to
for a few Descriptathons now,
and I can't imagine ever changing that.
That has really been an important development.
And it really shows in the quality of material
that has been produced.
I'm so looking forward to...
I've just gotten started exploring the app,
and there are so many more sites for me to check out
and then yet more for me to ask to be described.
And so even with all of this amazing wealth of description
in the app already,
we want more and more and more, right?
So can you give any sneak peeks
as to what is coming in the very near future
that isn't in the app just yet?
I mean, number one, even though we have done
a lot of work, 130 plus sites, there are 400 in the system,
so we're just kind of at the very beginning
of creating brochures for those sites.
That doesn't even count the wayside signs and the exhibits.
And there's just a tremendous amount that needs to be done.
And so what we've focused on is creating the training
and the infrastructure to allow people to go out
and create all the description that needs to happen.
We've been working with Parks Canada
so there's some Canadian sites that we've been working with.
We have scheduled to work with The Kennedy Center in D.C.,
which is a primary performing arts center in the country,
to help make that more accessible.
We're working with the national parks in the UK.
So we're really trying to embody this idea
that it's not just the United States
that needs to be more accessible,
it's the world that needs more be more accessible.
And anywhere, any person who is blind or low vision goes,
they should be able to have equivalent experiences
to people who are able to see the brochures
or paper or wayside signs or whatever it is,
and so we're really trying to push this
as a universal experience throughout all societies
and cultures and give people the tools to do it at no cost
and just kind of see where that leads us.
And so far, it's led us to quite a few exciting places
and I think the future is bright.
I agree. Fantastic.
I'm looking forward to so much more
and love what you guys are doing.
If people are interested
in finding out more about UniDescription,
what are a couple of ways they can do that?
Well, the primary way is to go to the website,
U-N-I description.org, so unidescription.org
and there's a ton of information on there about our research
or the best practices,
about our Descriptathon, who's involved,
and then the other part of that is you can go there.
And when you asked earlier, you know,
"How do you get started?"
I really encourage people to just create an account
and start describing things.
You could describe your kitchen if you want,
you know, what's in the cupboards in your kitchen,
and export that as a URL and you can keep it on your phone.
I mean, there's just a lot of ways
you can make all parts of your world more accessible
with what we're providing already.
But if you have any other questions or want to know more
or want to get some other site involved,
just send me an email to my name, brett.oppegaard@hawaii.edu
and I'll be happy to talk with you more.
Excellent, and we'll have all of that in our
show notes,
so be sure and check that out.
I want to thank you so much for taking a little time
in describing what you do
and starting to describe the world.
I love it. Thanks so much.
Yeah, thank you.
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