Imagine trying to browse through a wonderful collection of digital images on your community without being able to see them. Many people are just becoming aware of a technique called “audio description.” In this article we will talk about a digital imaging project, which uses audio description to make the images accessible to people with visual impairments.

What is audio description?
Audio Description (AD) is the descriptive narration of key visual elements of live theatre, television, movies, and other media to enhance their enjoyment by consumers who are blind or have low vision.  AD is the insertion of audio explanations and descriptions of the settings, characters, and action taking place in such media, when such information about these visual elements is not offered in the regular audio presentation.”  Audio description can be compared to closed captioning for the hearing impaired where on TV; the text of what is being said is displayed in a small box on the TV. Many public libraries are purchasing copies of videos, which have audio description for the visually impaired.  In a movie, audio description is used to describe what is happening via professional narration when there is no dialogue or loud sound effects to confuse the listener.  Talking book centers also have a selection of these videos for patrons.  The first mainstream TV show called “Blind Justice” debuted last spring.  The main character was a blind policeman.  The TV show also had audio description for visually impaired. This was the first time many people had ever heard of much less experienced audio description.

Illinois Alive Project
In 2004, we became curious to see if any library websites or digital archives were doing anything with audio description to make their digital images accessible to the visually impaired.  We found more sites collecting oral histories and putting them online, music, and other audio, but we did not find any library developing audio description, recording it, and making the MP3 file or the text of the description available for an historical collection.  The Alliance Library System wrote a successful grant to the Illinois State Library for a pilot project involving seven libraries to digitize images, learn how to create effective audio descriptions, professionally record audio description in a human voice, and make it available on the website as an MP3 file and also as text.  The result was Illinois Alive!  Early Illinois Heroes and Heroines: A Multimedia Montage.  This site can be viewed at http://www.alsaudioillinois.net/illinoisalive/index.htm. 

Challenges in Providing Audio Descriptions
There are a number of challenges in providing audio descriptions to digital images.  The first challenge is that our staff had to be trained on how to write them correctly.  Audio descriptions are not just, “Abraham Lincoln is sitting on a chair.”  It takes practice, training, and time to write a good audio description.  Our staff received training from Kim Carlson from Perkins School for the Blind and Andrea Doane, experts who had done a great deal of work in audio description.

In the training sessions, we learned about the guiding principles of audio description, key elements in a photograph important to include in the description (style, setting, focus, period, dress, facial features, objects, esthetics) and to try and objectively describe the photo without passing judgment or conveying our reactions to the digital image.  The entire process changed the way we--sighted individuals--viewed photographs.  Something that surprised us was the length of time it took to then write an audio description.

We selected a few photographs from each collection to write audio descriptions on.   As we gained more experience writing audio descriptions, the time it took to write them dropped a little, but not a lot.  After writing the audio descriptions, we hired a professional to record the audio for the narrations to create MP3 files to link to on the web.  The quality of these recordings was excellent; human voice audio takes a great deal of storage space.  A two-minute description could take up to 3 MB.  We also included the text of the description so that it could be listened to with a screen reader if preferred. In a number of projects we have worked on, we have found people highly prefer a human voice, but a few prefer their screen reader. 

We can share some reactions to some early testing we did in the project to make sure that the site and the navigation were working well for the visually impaired.   None of the testers – librarians or visually impaired--had experienced a similar site with audio description for the visually impaired.  They had had various experiences with audio description.  One individual had tried audio description in a museum, and several with video.   All preferred the human voice recorded for audio descriptions instead of a synthetic screen reader voice.  Some   felt that even sighted individuals would enjoy audio descriptions of an image because it brought more detail of the image to the eye than without the detailed description. 

Challenges and Barriers for Libraries
There will be challenges for libraries that want to add audio description to their online services.  Because writing the descriptions is a learned skill and is time consuming, adding audio descriptions will increase the overall cost of digital imaging projects.  It is important to get high quality audio, which can also be costly if the library has to hire a professional audio technician and recording studio.  MP3 files, like most audio files, are very large, and even for short descriptions, can be an arduous download on a dial-up connection.

Opportunities
Synthetic voices are improving quickly. Although an overwhelming majority of people, sighted and visually impaired alike, currently prefer to listen to natural narration with a real human voice, synthetic computer-generated voices are improving rapidly, and the cost of text-to-speech software is dropping.   Audio descriptions could be created using a synthetic voice, saving the costs associated with hiring an audio professional and a reader.  Audio description can improve a great experience in browsing through digital photos, even for the sighted.  Making digital libraries and archives accessible to the blind and visually impaired through audio description provides additional features that improve the access to and enrich the experience of these collections for everyone.

What’s Next?
The Illinois State Library wants to assist libraries to make their digital images accessible to the visually impaired.  In this year’s round of LSTA digital imaging grants, recipients will be required to select 10-12 images, take training, and create audio descriptions for these images using high quality synthetic voice, which is much less work intensive and does not take as much space as human voice.