Audio Description Production
The 5-Step Access Hound Process
Our mission is to promote widespread societal inclusion for people who cannot see or cannot see well through the ubiquitous integration of Audio Description.
We have developed a comprehensive process for making such high-quality accessible media, which directly includes people who are DeafBlind, blind, or who have low-vision as a part of the audio description creation process.
The team’s leader, Dr. Brett Oppegaard, has been the principal investigator on multiple national grants related to media accessibility, with support for such research provided by the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts, and the U.S. National Park Service, as well as from accessibility-supportive corporations, such as Google.
Most distinctively, the Access Hound team grounds its approaches to complex accessibility issues in the empirical research of Dr. Oppegaard and other world leaders in this area. In other words, we do not guess. We research and test.
The second virtual Descriptathon had a large support team behind it. This image shows a conference room in Crawford Hall at the University of Hawai'i, where most of the core group of Descriptathon administrators gathered to host the 28-team event. These eight people are sitting around a rectangular table. If you imagine the table as sort of a Daliesque clock, with Research Assistant Tuyet Hayes, in a bright pink shirt at the Noon position, the rest of the team, clockwise, is: Consultant Annie Leist, Consultant Sina Bahram, Developer Joe Oppegaard, Co-PI Thomas Conway, PI Brett Oppegaard, NPS Accessibility Coordinator Michele Hartley, and Research Assistant Phil Jordan. Everyone has a laptop in front of them and is busily working, except Jordan, who is standing next to Hartley and talking with her about a piece of paper he is holding.