In the 8 May Intentionally Equitable Hospitality (IEH) session, I learned from one of the participants who is visually impaired that they had taken a film and literature class and the teacher had sat with them during film screenings and provided custom, live audio descriptions.

So to reflect using the Here, There, Everywhere model:

Here

Something in our time together that caught your attention, piqued your curiosity or, at the very least, you noticed. It might be a game, a comment from a fellow participant, a concept, a visual framework, etc…

The practice of providing and experiencing live audio descriptions seemed so amazing and like a fantastic way to both enable someone else’s engagement and at the same time transform your own — I’m imagining how different it would be to watch a movie and try to describe what is going on the whole time rather than just passively absorbing it — and also, to be a sighted viewer and also hear a live audio description as a companion to what you yourself are otherwise experiencing.

There

How you might take that specific example and implement it at work or in your personal life. Bring in as much detail as you can to make for easy implementation; imagine your future self doing it and the outcome it generates.

Now I want to try this practice regardless of whether it might be needed by some of the viewers or not. The describing baton could be passed from viewer to viewer so as to enable multiple perspectives in one viewing. It seems like it might open up a totally new (to me at least) modality for viewing time-based art (ie, movies) that makes me really excited to try to watch some movies this way so that I can discover how it might open new experiences — maybe especially with some movies that I already know well.

Everywhere

A generalized interpretation of this thing that would allow for more universal application — an underlying principle absent context.

It seems like it would be helpful to establish some things in advance to make it easier to provide fast-paced, live audio description. For example, it might be handy to have a guide to the major characters in the movie (maybe including the actors who play them) and/or settings, so that everyone is familiar with the names of characters during the movie. It might make sense to have a short session before the screening to introduce the characters/settings and any other common characteristics of the movie so that everyone was more familiar with things before starting to watch.

It might also be helpful to enable captions for the dialog in a movie so that the audio description wouldn’t have to try to reproduce the dialog exactly. I’m sure there is a lot of history and practices around audio description, all of which I’m just discovering now, starting with the Wikipedia page.

I can imagine a future where I might attend a screening of a movie I know well, but to hear the live audio description of that movie by someone who has a unique and interesting perspective, perhaps very different from my own.