Transcript: Alex Varley reports on the USA's Described and Captured Media Program

6 November 2011

Roberta:  Media Access Australia’s CEO Alex Varley has just returned from America, and among the interesting places that he visited on his travels is the small town of Spartanburg, South Carolina. This place has significance for blind people in that it is the headquarters of the Described and Captions Media Program, an organisation that provides audio described education resources for schoolchildren right across America. Welcome, Alex. 

Alex:  Hi there Roberta. 

Roberta:  Now Alex we’ve talked before on the program in general, but two aspects that are new are a project looking at age appropriate description and another looking at extended description. Now what is age appropriate description, Alex? 

Alex:  Okay. That’s quite an interesting one in that the DCMP, as it’s known, deals with school aged children, and what they’re actually looking at is how do you do description for children who are in early primary, so that’s kindergarten to year three. And what they’re recognising there is that children of that age generally can’t read, but they actually have a much more complex vocabulary above the expected reading ages or reading ability.

And what they’re trying to explore is what’s the appropriate way to describe things, because as we all know with describers generally, on things like movies, they like to use big words and be colourful and descriptive about everything. But that might not be appropriate for say a seven or eight year old child. They may not understand what the words actually mean. 

Roberta:  That’s true too. But what impact do you think it’ll have on audio description in general? 

Alex:  Well I think what this shows is that audio description as a process is maturing, and that what people are now starting to do is look just beyond the idea of you must have description or description must pick up the most important things that are displayed visually, and they’re actually starting to think about okay, in the context of something like a school program, what is it that they really need to get and how do we describe that? So it could be tables, it could be charts and diagrams. And there needs to be the right kind of language that’s appropriate to the audience. 

Roberta:  Alex, what is extended description? 

Alex:  Okay. The other part of this project is that with audio description normally, on say a TV program or a movie, then you’d get the description in the gaps in the soundtrack. Now one of the problems with education titles is that they tend to be incredibly visual, so they will have things like tables and diagrams, and lots of rich information. So what they need to do is say “How do we get that all described?”, because the gap in the soundtrack might only be a few seconds.

So extended description is a way of actually adding in more description by effectively stopping the soundtrack, allowing a full rich description to happen, and then starting up the soundtrack again. You can do it because what they actually use is digital media, so you can actually stop and start a video, and not like a TV program or a DVD. And you can add in as many layers of description as you want. 

Roberta:  So what sort of challenges does this throw up for describers and using it in a classroom? 

Alex:  Well I think from one side of the describers, if they have an unlimited potentially amount of time to describe, it’s about still holding to that discipline of keeping the stuff relevant and keeping to the main point. The challenge for the classroom is that a lot of education media is designed around a sort of 30/40 minute lesson, and so if you’ve got something like extended description which is obviously going to take a lot longer than 30/40 minutes, do you actually then make the video shorter, and play the whole thing so that everybody hears it, or do you have some special arrangement with the child that needs the description where they view that and listen to that separately? And these are issues that they are actually starting to talk through. 

Roberta:  And where is Australia on the use of audio description in the classroom, Alex? 

Alex:  Well we of course are a fair way behind on that whole area. Really the only people who are doing a serious program are the Americans. What we’re doing in Australia at the moment is really I think trying to focus on still getting a general audio description service happening on, say television, and extending it in DVDs and online video for everybody.

So Media Access Australia is certainly interested in this area, because as some of your listeners might know we do a fair bit of work in the deaf education area. But I think we’re exploring about whether we can scope that out and get a proper program together. Because certainly something we don’t want to do is make promises that it’s going to happen and do something half hearted, because it’s just not useful for anybody. 

Roberta:  That’s the truth too. Well thank you for that Alex. I’ve been speaking with Alex Varley, who is the CEO of Media Access Australia. And if you’d like some more information about audio description you can visit the Media Access Australia website which is mediaaccess.org.au, or you can phone 02 9212 6242. And Media Access Australia are supporters of this program.