Audio Description: If Your Eyes Could Speak

This presentation will cover the value and process of creating audio descriptions. It is intended for anyone interested in accessibility to media, performing arts, or visual art for people who are blind or have low vision. Speaker Joel Snyder—an internationally known "audio describer"—will emphasize the importance of accessibility for people with disabilities.

Audio description is a translation of images to words—the visual made verbal—and provides access to the wide range of media and arts (television, film, performing arts, museums) found in any culture. Using succinct, vivid, and imaginative words, media describers convey the visual images from television and film that are not fully accessible to a significant segment of the population. According to the American Foundation for the Blind (2019), more than 40 million Americans experience significant vision loss. 

Snyder, author of The Visual Made Verbal: A Comprehensive Training Manual and Guide to the History and Applications of Audio Description, is recognized  as a pioneer in the field of audio description. Since 1981, he has introduced audio description techniques in over 40 states and 65 countries and has made thousands of live events, media projects, and museums accessible. Most recently, Snyder was named a Fulbright Scholar to train audio describers in Greece over a four-week period.