Ep. 40: Close Up With Dr. Joel Snyder, Pioneer Of Audio Description

Alex and Lee chat with Dr. Joel Snyder, known as the pioneer of audio description. He is also the president of Audio Description Associates LLC and founder/senior consultant of the Audio Description Project. He has a wealth of knowledge and experience, which he shares in this insightful conversation.

Visit the Audio Description Project here: https://adp.acb.org 

Check out YOU Describe here: https://youdescribe.org 

Buy Joel’s book, “The Visual Made Verbal” here: https://acbminimall.org/product/23?v=51

Check out the Blind Can Film Festival hosted by our sponsor, Ben Fox:
https://www.blindcan.com

Search for Audio Description availability for any title on the American Council for the Blind's Website!

If you have any questions for us or want to connect, feel free to e-mail darkroomfilmcast@gmail.com and be sure to follow us on Instagram and YouTube at @darkroomfilmcast 

Find transcripts of our episodes on our hosting site, Buzzsprout!
Subscribe to our YouTube Channel!
Support us on Patreon!
Follow us on Instagram!
Find us on Facebook!

Transcript

Note: This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Lee Pugsley
What's up, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of The Dark Room, where two blind cinephiles illuminate the sighted. I'm Lee Pugsley.

Alex Howard
I'm Alex Howard.

Lee Pugsley
And this is a podcast hosted by two legally blind guys for film lovers of all abilities. And today is a super exciting episode. We have a very special guest, and I can't wait to dive into it. Alex, I'll go ahead and let you introduce our guest for this episode.

Alex Howard
Yeah, so today we have Dr. Joel Snyder. He is the pioneer of audio description. He's been around audio description since pretty much its inception. He's done guest speaking and talks in various countries and has also done a few audio description tracks himself, including Night of the Living Dead and Stephen King's The Shining. Welcome, Joel.

Dr. Joel Snyder
Thank you, Alex. Thank you. It makes me sound like a specialist in horror movies or something. [laughs]

Alex Howard
That's true.

Dr. Joel Snyder
I did actually did the description for the original Nosferatu, not the one that came out recently.

Alex Howard
That's true. And I just actually watched that. I meant-- I bookmarked that in my head, and then we were just talking about The Shining. So I went to that first.

Dr. Joel Snyder
Yeah, the Night of the Living. In fact, there was the company, Vitac, is the nation's largest captioning company, and I do a lot of work with them. And we decided to offer a Halloween gift to the world. We developed, um-- They did the captions, of course, and I developed the audio description for horror-related films and just put them out there on YouTube so people could access them. It was Night of the Living Dead, Nosferatu, Carnival of Souls, which is not nearly as well known. And the fourth one, this is sort of fun, is a Popeye cartoon that was, the title for it was Right to the Finish. [dog barks in background] Excuse my puppy dog there. He gets excited when he hears about Popeye cartoons, I guess. Right to the Finish. It's just a seven-minute Popeye cartoon that has to do with Halloween, and Popeye and Bluto are trying to outdo themselves with scaring each other, that kind of thing. But they're freely available on YouTube.

Alex Howard
Yeah. I own the The Criterion of Night of the Living Dead. So what I do is I put in the Blu-ray, and then I have the YouTube on my phone, and I match up that way and watch it that way.

Dr. Joel Snyder
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. Absolutely. So it sounds a little bit like what YouDescribe does.

Alex Howard
Spectrum?

Dr. Joel Snyder
It's a website. Yeah. Well, Spectrum Access is the app. But no, you describe, YouDescribe.org is a site that was developed by Josh Miele, who I just saw Josh yesterday at the CSUN conference. Josh is a totally blind scientist. He works at Amazon now. But I first got to know Josh about 15 years ago when he developed YouDescribe, which allows people to upload to a site YouTube videos and then upload to those YouTube videos a description track that just anybody can create and then match them together and make them available because-- Obviously, everybody knows there are millions of YouTube videos, and they're not all going to be professionally described. So this allows someone to sort of do fan description. There's a whole group out there in the world of fan subs that do subtitles for videos and films that they just love. They just do it as amateurs because they love adding subtitles. And there are people that do that with description as well.

Alex Howard
Yeah, I think our editor Jamie does that with his videos and stuff.

Dr. Joel Snyder
There you go, sure.

Alex Howard
I know you've been around audio description since its inception, pretty much. We were wondering if you could give us how you got into audio description and then your history with AD and all of that.

Dr. Joel Snyder
Sure. Oh, sure. Well, thank you, Alex and Lee. Absolutely. Yeah, audio description... Description, I should say, the act of using language to tell someone about the visual elements of something that they were at. That's been around since prehistoric times. One caveman saying to the other, "Look out, Og! There's a mastodon coming from the left!" That's description. Og wasn't blind, but he was looking the wrong way. Then I have a whole chapter in my book on the history of audio description. You can trace it in a little bit more formal sense. I mean, everybody does description. "Hey, let me tell you what I was at last night," that kind of thing. In a little bit more formal sense, in Greek times, there was a form of poetry called Ekphrasis, e-k-p-h-r-a-s-i-s, that really was about using words in poetic form to describe a visual image. And In my book, I quote Homer, Homer's description of an Achilles sword that's in the Iliad, and that was a form of ekphrasis. Description has got a marvelous history to it. But more recently, when I teach description, I sometimes hearken back to the mayor of New York City in 1940s. Some people will know Fiorello La Guardia. He was the mayor of New York, and New York's LaGuardia Airport is named for him. He was a very savvy and very popular mayor in the 1940s. Not only was he popular, he was very short, too. He was 5'2. But he was a much beloved mayor. And during his tenure, there was a newspaper strike in the 1940s. Now, think about that, of course. There was no internet, there was no television. There there was radio and newspapers. That's how you got your information. And he didn't take the side of the publishers. He didn't take the side of the newspaper workers. He took the side of the people of New York City. And he said, "This is going on. What are the people missing? What's the first thing you turn to on Sunday in the newspaper? It's the comics." So he went on WNYC radio every Sunday and read the comics to the people of New York City. And, of course, very quickly realized, "Oh, I need to describe the images." And I actually have recordings of Mayor La Guardia describing the images because he can't just read the words of the comics.

Dr. Joel Snyder
I cite that because in a way, that's how I started with description. In 1970s, I was a volunteer reader for the Metropolitan Washington Ear here in Washington, DC, a radio reading service. And there still are, probably maybe at least dozen of them around the country. And my assignment for 10 years was reading the Washington Post on Sundays. So there was no such thing as an audio describer, but, golly, you're reading the newspaper. There are pictures, there are illustrations, there are the comics. And I would, Sundays, read the comics and describe them, not even knowing that what I was doing is what would become audio description. But in 1980, the founder of the Washington Ear, a blind woman, Dr. Margaret Pfanstiehl, and a blind fellow who worked at the Department of Education, Chet Avery, were both on a committee on accessibility at Arena Stage here in Washington. And think about that, 1980. Theaters weren't doing accessibility committees. It just wasn't a thing. But Arena did. And one meeting, they were excited to talk about the installation of an assisted listening system to boost sound of the theater productions for folks who have some hearing loss or are hard of hearing, as they say. Gee, what a wonderful thing. Nowadays, that's everywhere. It's ubiquitous. Every movie theater has a system for boosting sound. But that was brand new in 1980. Margaret Pfanstiehl and Chet Avery were both on this committee. Now, they're blind. So they heard about this system and thought, "That's great. That's a wonderful thing. Hm! I wonder if it could be used to help people people who don't see the images of the theatrical productions, because if it's just a microphone on stage and the sound is being amplified, couldn't someone, oh, hold another microphone, another channel of the system, off stage, and describe action, primarily." It may be in the pauses between bits and pieces of dialog or critical sound elements. And the house manager at Arena Stage, Wayne White, great guy. I knew Wayne back in the '80s. He thought about it and thought, "Well, yeah, it's a two-channel system. We could try it. I guess we could do that. But who would do the describing? How would this work?" Well, Margaret ran with the idea. She came back to the Washington Ear, and she grabbed me and a few others. I had a background as an equity actor and voice talent already, but also as an English teacher and such, and teaching theater and speech. So along with me and a couple of others, we began to hammer out what this would be. We called it audio description. And how would we do this? What would be the basic best practices or rules or guidelines? We hammered all of that out. And in 1981, the first ever audio-described theatrical production in a formal sense, was done at Arena Stage, Major Barbara. And then-- I didn't do Major Barbara, but I did several others that year at Arena. And it was only a few years later when we did the pilot for WGBH because they'd heard about what we were doing and thought, "Oh, we know how we could get this happening for public broadcasting using a secondary audio program" -- that was rarely used! It was there for Spanish translation. So that's what was used for audio description at the very first.

Dr. Joel Snyder
The only other thing I'll add, because I'm going on here, but in the '70s, I don't want to forget about a great guy, the late Gregory Fraser in San Francisco, who did a master's thesis on audio description, really. It was the first published written work literature on audio description. His master's thesis was called An All Audio Adaptation of the Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman, which was a great movie, you may recall, with Cicely Tyson. He had been at home with a blind friend. They were going to spend the afternoon watching High Noon, the old Gary Cooper film, and Gregory was describing as it went along. And the two of them thought, "Well, this is fine, but wouldn't it be neat if there was a recorded track or something, and friends didn't have to do description for their friends," which that's been going on for millennia, of course. So Gregory thought about that and did up a master's thesis. So he's the first person to define the art and act of audio description. But he-- And he later developed a formal service called Audiovision in San Francisco, but that wasn't until mid '80s, after we did it in Washington. Audiovision still exists doing description for theater in San Francisco, and the Washington Ear still has an audio description program here in the DC area as well. So there you go. That's an extended, finger-nail sketch of the history of description.

Alex Howard
No, that's great. And I know you mentioned secondary--

Dr. Joel Snyder
The secondary audio program, SAP. Yeah.

Alex Howard
Yeah, I know you mentioned the SAP channels, and I know that they still use that today. I think TVW is using it for SNL this year.

Dr. Joel Snyder
Yeah, absolutely. I guess I'll say, unfortunate, is that for, what is it, 10 years now in the United States, at least, we've had digital programming. The SAP channel was done for analog television broadcasts. Technique or methodology is still used today, but because digital programming enables that there is the possibility of including up to, I think, a dozen or 16 separate audio tracks, back in the day, was just the one. So you either had Spanish translation or you had audio description. And even today, sometimes on weekends, football games, sports events will have Spanish translation, and you can't get description then on broadcast television. So I still am hoping that at some point that will be regularly available, more audio channels so you could hear Spanish translation, you could hear Spanish audio description, you could hear English audio description, you could hear audio description in other languages and such. You could hear different forms of audio description. You could hear it done by one company and then hear the same broadcast here done by another company. Some people like a lot of talking in the description. Some people are more minimalist. Etc. So that maybe is something on the horizon.

Lee Pugsley
Yeah, I think that the history of description is really fascinating because audio description as a formal conceit has been around since the 1980s. But it's interesting to think about the idea of description of someone describing visual elements to other people. Obviously, that's been around since the beginning of time, like you said, but it's just something that we don't always think about in that way of like, "Oh, no, like description itself is not a new thing. The formal audio description track, that's a newer thing in the last few decades."

Dr. Joel Snyder
That's right.

Lee Pugsley
Then the other thing that's really interesting to me that, I guess I thought it was the other way around, was that audio description started in live performance. And I always thought that it started in film first, and then live performances were like, why don't we adapt that?

Dr. Joel Snyder
Oh, right. It actually worked that way with museums. It was a live performance, and then it was on television, VHS, tapes, remember them? And then museums ultimately picked up on it. But yeah, it was live performance. It was even on audio cassettes for a time. In fact, that's something I'm still trying to convince the film producers to allow their work, the audio tracks of their work, to be paired with audio description and release it as an audio file. And then you would have a filmic version of an audiobook, an audio film, if you will. It was tried in Canada back in the '90s on audio cassettes, if you can believe it, for public domain films. And when I broached this, in fact, even companies like Amazon, as you know, owns Audible. Amazon produces all kinds of streaming films. Golly, they own Audible. Wouldn't that be a perfect match? But there are all kinds of legal issues that get tied up in lifting the audio track from one thing and pairing it with audio description. The contracts with the actors and musicians and such just don't include that possibility. And ultimately, again, there's another thing for the future. I would love to see that happen because that's something that could really popularize audio description amongst sighted people. They could use audio description when they're on a long car ride or they're at the gym or whatever, that kind of thing. Audio description is not just for blind people. It's for folks on the autism spectrum. It's for folks with ADHD, folks learning a new language, and for sighted people who, of course, see, but they don't observe, they don't really notice. And that's what professional describers are trained to do, is to notice and decide what's most important to describe. So that's the other thing since the '80s and '90s is the development of these best practices or guidelines. And my book essentially was a compilation of, a study of guidelines that existed in about five countries, very much the same, really, and putting it out there in very plain language for everybody to use and learn about and hopefully make their description more effective by following certain best practices.

Lee Pugsley
Yeah. And on that note, that actually brings up another question that I was curious about. So since the '80s, when audio description became more of a formal practice, what phases or changes, I guess, how has the trajectory of it been through the decades? Were there different phases where it's like, "Okay, here's the live performance phase. Now it shifted to this next phase, to this next phase?" I guess the trajectory since the '80s of how the landscape of audio description has changed.

Dr. Joel Snyder
That's a great question, actually, and an important one, really, because, as I say, in 1981, we began doing it with performing arts in the Washington, DC, area. And we actually played-- We knew, "Oh, this would be great for television." And we tried to do it as a small entity in the DC area. We thought, "Well, the radio reading service is broadcast on a subcarrier of an FM radio station, WETA, here in Washington, DC. What if we tried to time it so that, say, right at two o'clock, people would know this is when a film comes on on television, and right at two o'clock, we would then play the audio description track, and could they be married and work?" And of course, we were pioneering audio description, but we weren't the most savvy television engineers, that just doesn't work. The latency between the signals and various other issues complicated that. But our experiment was heard about by Dr. Barry Cronin, who was at WGBH in Boston. He thought, "Oh, here's the way to do it." He knew about this secondary audio program channel. He came to us and said, "We know about SAP, we know about television broadcast, we don't know about description." He asked us at the Washington Ear to pilot audio description for television broadcasts. That was in 1985. So that was the next era. I actually I wrote and voiced three of the very first audio-described television broadcasts. This was all under American Playhouse, the old PBS series. I wrote and voiced the description for The Diaries of Adam and Eve, Native Son, and there was one other piece that I did as well. But then we did about a dozen of them, something like that, and it worked! And WGBH ran with it. That was the next era, is having description on a regular basis for certain PBS programs created by WGBH, an independent PBS station.

Dr. Joel Snyder
Then, the next era or phase, was VHS videotapes. Why shouldn't people be able to rent their tape and just listen and use and watch audio description in their home? Which was great, but destined to fade as VHS videotapes, that process faded, partly because of the fidelity of this new DVD format, partly because on VHS videotape, you could only have one audio track. So you either had a tape that had a description or you had a tape without description. You couldn't turn it on and off. That meant blockbuster video had to have dual inventory. That wasn't going to last, but VHS didn't last either. So the next phase was on DVDs, which was perfect in that you could turn it on and off like a director's commentary. And nowadays, of course, DVDs have faded to a great extent. Once it became popular in media, though, that's when things started really percolating in theaters and dance and opera and in museums as well. So really, it took until media got into it for audio description to become more popular, better known. And in fact, the next phase of that, if you will, was the mandate of audio description. And that actually happened in the year 2000. The Federal Communications Commission, of course, has jurisdiction over the public airwaves. And the Congress, back in the year 2000, had asked the FCC to explore the development of audio description for public broadcast. Captioning had already been available for some 20 years or so or more, even, making television broadcast accessible to people who are deaf. Well, what about people who are blind? So Congress asked the FCC to explore it. And what the FCC did was not only explore it, but they mandated it. They actually issued a rule saying, "Let's start. Let's do it." The four terrestrial broadcasters, and by that time, they were cable broadcasters broadcasters, the top five cable broadcasters, you have to provide audio description for at least four hours a week, and just those top nine broadcasters in, I think it was 25 jurisdictions. And they started doing it. But it was challenged in the courts by the Motion Picture Association of America, by the National Association of Broadcasters, and perhaps, oddly enough, the National Federation of the Blind was a party to that lawsuit saying, "Hold on, you can't make us make speech. You can't require us to add a soundtrack to these works of art. It's a government overreach. No, we don't believe it's legal." And that lawsuit succeeded really on technical grounds because Congress had not told the FCC to start a mandate. They only told the FCC to explore it. And on those grounds, the rule was struck down. So it was no longer required to provide audio description.

Dr. Joel Snyder
Now, some networks had gotten into it and begun providing description to a limited degree, and they continued because there was demand, even though it was a brand new thing. Ultimately, that spread to other countries. But it took 10 years before Congress actually passed a law in 2010 that mandated audio description, told the FCC to actually go ahead and mandate it at that same minimal, very minimal level, not even 1% of all broadcasts. But it was in place in 2010, President Obama signed the legislation, and it became effective in 2012. So that was the next era. If I had to break things into phases or eras, I think at that point, people were beginning to establish guidelines and best practices. My book came along in 2014, so we were beginning to grow up as a field, become more professional. The American Council of the Blind, separate from the National Federation of the Blind, the American Council of the Blind really embraced audio description. They just loved it and wanted to boost it. And I worked with them to start something that we called the Audio Description Project about 15 years ago, 2010. So right about when the mandate went in. And now, the Audio Description Project has all kinds of activities that it pursues. Its most visible element is the website, adp.acb.org, where you can find out what's on television right now with description, what streaming services are offering it, what performing art space in your state, what museum in your state. And there's loads of articles and historical artifacts, Gregory Fraser's master thesis is posted on the website, all of that. So I directed the Audio Description Project for about 10 years. And I've stepped back now. I still teach the Audio Description Institute for the project and help with various aspects, but it's going strong as a function of the American Council of the Blind. So that's another era.

Dr. Joel Snyder
I guess the only other thing I would add as far as another phase or era is that about 15, 17 years ago in Europe, there were already programs, academic programs for the study of audiovisual translation, which really meant subtitling and dubbing. Most commercial media came from the United States, films, entertainment, and it was all being shared around the world, but not everybody was speaking English. It had to be dubbed into French or German or Italian, or subtitled into those languages. Well, about 17 years ago, the heads of a half a dozen of those audiovisual translation programs, teaching audiovisual translation in the university level, they heard about description. They invited me to a gathering of their group in La Iria, Portugal. We spent a week or two talking about description, considering best practices, training, et cetera. And from that, developed actual courses of study for audio description. My own PhD is from a program that I helped start at the University in Barcelona. That was in 2013. Now it's going at about, oh, at least half a dozen universities have formal graduate programs where people can major in the development of audio description and get master's degrees and PhDs and that thing, do that research. And that's going strong. In fact, next week, I will be for the fourth or fifth time now at a conference in Barcelona called ARSAD, A-R-S-A-D, the Advanced Research Seminar in Audio Description. And it's a gathering of several hundred folks from all around the world who are interested in description, who have written about it, who practice audio description. I will be there presenting along with them. In the States, usually people like Matt Kaplowitz from Bridge Multimedia attend a couple of academics, perhaps. But it remains the study of audio description, it remains a European phenomenon. As much as I've tried to get universities here in the States to begin doing it, I've begun some of that work at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. In fact, they've begun to establish a, if I do say so myself, the Dr. Joel Snyder Audio Description Archive, because I have over 40 years of scripts and material and literature and such. They've taken all that material and they're beginning to sort it and catalog it and document it. We hope that there will be contributions over the years from other countries and other producers of description here in the States and be a real research center, online, primarily, for people to study audio description and learn more about it. There's a bit of a lengthy, I went on a bit, but history of the phases of the development of audio description.

Alex Howard
No, that's really great. Thank you. So when did you see movie theaters really start embracing it? I feel like I didn't really hear a lot about audio description until about 2010 or so.

Dr. Joel Snyder
Right Right.

Alex Howard
But--

Dr. Joel Snyder
You're right. Movie theaters, um, that's another phase, really, that I skipped over. I'm trying to think of the first movie in a feature film, broadcast with... Or broadcast, screened, I should say, with description. It was in the '90s. It was The Jackal in Los Angeles, but it was a one-off type thing.

Alex Howard
Was that one live description?

Dr. Joel Snyder
Or was it- Well, it was recorded. But that's interesting that you mentioned that, Alex, because in the '90s, there were-- I know in Columbus, Ohio, there was a group there that made film screenings accessible, but you couldn't just go to any screening. You went to a particular screening where there was a live audio describer using using the same equipment used in live theater, and that person would have developed a script and would be speaking it into a handheld StenoMask microphone, and people would have receivers and hear it, so it was done live. And that's not done very often, although when I teach description-- I've worked with description in over 60 countries now. In Indonesia, they actually have something called cinema whisperers. I'm not sure it exists any longer, but it was certain screenings once a month where blind people could go and bring your friends, and everybody was whispering to each other, "What's going on on this screen?" In fact, deaf people used to do that, too. Once a month, there was a deaf screening in the movie theater that had captions. Well, now, every feature film, now, just about every feature film comes with an audio description track because, and I want to say in the early 2000s, I'd have to pin that date down, but there was a lawsuit brought by an individual, against a movie theater saying, "Hey, I'm not a person who uses a wheelchair. I can get into the movie theater." The idea of ramps making the movie theater physically accessible, that was well accepted. But okay, I'm blind. I'm deaf. I get into the movie theater. It's not programmatically accessible. So in response to that lawsuit and concern, structured negotiations occurred. And under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the movie producers realized, whoa, they're going to have to get on board because you can't expect every movie theater to develop description and captions for every film they show, obviously. So the movie theaters got on board. And in the same way, streaming services, you all know that, for instance, Netflix, not only do they offer description, but they offer it in multiple languages. Well, initially, it took some real negotiation with the American Council of the Blind to get them to accept it and understand that this would be a worthwhile thing, morally right to do, but actually something that would just make them more profitable and more inclusive. And not only did they ultimately embrace it, as I say, they do description in multiple languages, as does Amazon to a certain extent, and Disney, and other streaming services. Now, multiple streaming services offer description. I did a survey three or four years ago with the World Blind Union, and we learned that audio description in some manner was available in 71 countries. And that's largely because of streaming. In most of those countries they were starting to develop description in theater and such, but most of those countries at least had access to streaming packages that had description. So they knew about description through that. And hopefully from there, Lee, as you mentioned earlier, that will jumpstart description in performing arts spaces in those countries and with other kinds of events. I've obviously done thousands of description tracks for videos and films and performing arts, but I've also described weddings. I've also described sporting events, rodeos, parades, circuses. I've described even funerals. So wherever the visual image is important to an understanding, "He points to his head in appreciation, his hand is on his heart," of the image. Description can be and should be everywhere and can help multiple populations.

Lee Pugsley
I agree with that. The description should be everywhere. And there's so many benefits beyond just for the blind and low vision communities for so many other people as well. I'm curious then to know, as we look forward to the future of audio description and description in general, what areas do you identify where there's room to grow and what improvements or changes would you like to see going forward in the audio description landscape?

Dr. Joel Snyder
Well, that's also a great question, Lee. The first thing that occurs to me is, first couple of things really are technical issues. I think this came up briefly earlier, but I think the future of audio description delivery is in the smartphone. More and more people have smartphones, have the capability to download tracks to their phone. And the American Council of the Blind worked with a small company called Activision a number of years ago, whereby they developed an app, the app that people could download to their phones and then download to that phone app, the audio description track for a film. And what the app did, when the film started in the movie theater or at home, you could press a button and it automatically syncs the audio description to the audio from your television or from the movie theater. Ultimately, that app was purchased by Charter Communications and Spectrum Access. It's called Spectrum Access now. And they provide that service through your own smartphone, maybe to some 600 films, which is a drop in the bucket. They have to get to past some legal hurdles, I think, to make it even more available. But I think that's going to ultimately be part of the future for description, because even today -- Lee, you and Alex probably know this -- if you go to a movie theater and you're eager to see this new film, it has description. You go to the movie theater and the usher, there's turnover every two weeks or something. You say, "I want to be able to hear the audio description," and they say, "You want what?" They don't really know. Or they think you mean boosting sound. So they give you a headset that's set for boosting sound, whereas you have to set it differently to receive the audio description. So you as a blind person, you're in the movie theater and you're not getting the description. You have to go back and complain and they have to check it. Maybe the batteries are low, they haven't recharged it. I know blind people with stacks of free passes to movie theaters because, "Oh, I'm so sorry, it didn't work out. Here's a free pass. You can come back next week," and they still won't have the equipment working. Well, they have to maintain the equipment because not everybody has a smartphone. But ultimately, I really think the smartphone is the way to go. Boy, especially since post-COVID, do you really want to be using headsets and ear buds that multiple other people have been handling, et cetera, et cetera? So, best to use your own phone to access the audio description. I think that's a big step that's on the horizon. I think for broadcast television, streaming services, hearing description in 5. 1 sound, as opposed to simple mono track, is something that will become more available.

Alex Howard
That'd be great.

Dr. Joel Snyder
Yeah. Audio films, as I mentioned, I think ultimately, well, I can't imagine that there aren't movie production companies that wouldn't welcome, say, offering an audio-only version of their film for, say, a dollar per download. It's free money for them. They already have the material. Maybe they have to redo some legal contracts, but I think that's on the horizon as well. And understanding audio description as a tool for building literacy. Long since there have been many studies that talk about closed captioning and how closed captions help. It helps them learn English by seeing the language. In the same way a person learning English hears language, hears synonyms, hears different vocabulary, hears similes, hear different language concepts. It helps them learn a language. For six years, I led a team that did the description for Sesame Street on television. We heard about that all the time, that blind kids were learning more. They were not just blind kids. Any child listening to Sesame Street with the audio description was developing a more sophisticated sense of literacy because they heard different words and such. And that was thanks to the Department of Education, funded that project. And as they have for many children's programs for a number of years, hopefully that funding will remain. The Department of Education is the principal funder of something called the Described and Captioned Media program, and they produce captions and description for thousands of children's videos, educational videos, and hopefully that program will stay in place.

Alex Howard
That's really interesting. And like you were saying about movie theaters, yeah, Lee and I go to the theater all the time, and I think they've changed a lot of the devices now where it's all in one with audio enhancement and audio description.

Dr. Joel Snyder
They are, that's right. But it's two different audio channels, so you have to switch. And sometimes they don't switch it, and so you have to know that and switch yourself. Yeah.

Alex Howard
But you're right. Lee and I, we've trained the theaters we go to really well.

Dr. Joel Snyder
[laughs] Right.

Alex Howard
They know how to do it, and we know nationwide, like it's not... We're pretty fortunate over here to have them on top of it because we go multiple times a week.

Dr. Joel Snyder
You guys are cinephiles, and they know, "Oh, here comes Alex. Here comes Lee."

Lee Pugsley
Exactly.

Dr. Joel Snyder
"We know what that's about. Get the audio description." 

Lee Pugsley
Yep yep. We've always thought, we've had conversations about this, about the smartphone idea that it does seem like that's the most practical and most efficient solution to audio description tracks. It makes sense.

Dr. Joel Snyder
Yeah, I think so. So it's just there's some legal hurdles, I think, that have to be challenged, dealt with in some way so that more audio description tracks are available to Spectrum Access. In fact, Spectrum Access is in this country, but there are maybe half a dozen of those apps in other countries, and they're dealing with the same thing. They have to... Those audio description tracks are owned by the studios, so they have to be made available by the studios. And that's a whole other legal and technical hurdle.

Alex Howard
Yeah. And I know, like you were saying, behind me, I have a shelf of movies, and I actually use the Audio Description Project to go through. And I have on the top all my audio described disks, and on the bottom, the non-audio described, and I counted the disks that are available on Spectrum Access. I put them up in the AD section.

Dr. Joel Snyder
Cool. Yeah. Yeah. My understanding, last time I talked with my friend Peter, who is a blind man who works for Spectrum Access, Petr Kucheryavyy, I believe he told me 600 to 800 titles are available. But even that is a drop in the bucket. The Audio Description Project lists description being available on close to 15,000 DVDs now or digital services. The audio description project doesn't actually provide the description, but it's a place where you're a clearing house where you can say, "Ah, that movie has description and it's available on Amazon or it's available on Disney or what have you." 

Alex Howard
Yeah. And we usually link it in our description. And I know they link to our podcast on their website, too.

Dr. Joel Snyder
Yeah, that's right. There's a whole page that lists podcasts because there are at least a half a dozen podcasts now that have to do with audio description.

Lee Pugsley
Yeah, the Audio Description Project, I go there all the time to check on different titles to see if they're described. And it's just so helpful to know where to find them, too, because media travels all the time from one place to another place. And just because it have audio description on one platform doesn't always mean it will have audio description on another platform, and hopefully it will improve that, too.

Dr. Joel Snyder
Oh, boy, that's a great point because that really shouldn't be. That is another issue that the ACB is pursuing. This notion that if it's created once, it should travel with the work, no matter what the format. Because we were talking before the broadcast that I did the description for Stephen King's The Shining, but that was for television broadcast. Where is that track now? I have a copy of it, but does it still exist? No, somebody probably redoes it the next time a description is needed when it's being broadcast or something like that. I remember doing description. I did description for two of the Star Wars films, but they were for the first television broadcasts of them. So once the broadcasts are done, where are they now? Thank goodness, they were also produced for the theatrical screenings, and they may or may not have been reproduced for the DVDs and the streaming services. But it's a little odd that we end up with three and four versions of audio description for a particular film. And then maybe that's a good thing in one sense. Economically, it probably doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but there should be some more consistency in that sense, perhaps.

Alex Howard
Do you remember when you did Star Wars, did Han shoot first in your version?

Dr. Joel Snyder
Did it haunt me?

Alex Howard
No, did Han shoot first in the version you did?

Dr. Joel Snyder
Oh, did. Oh, Han! I did Description for Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Okay. When they were broadcast on, for the first time, I think it was ABC. So this is a way back. But I love the whole series. I've seen all of them, and was honored to be able to do the description for two of them, at least for broadcast television.

Alex Howard
That's awesome. Yeah, they probably have remastered it.

Dr. Joel Snyder
Oh, yeah.

Alex Howard
A couple of times. Yeah. So this will be a tough question for you, but I think it'll be a fun one. So I know you started as a voice actor, and you've obviously become a huge advocate for description and done public speaking and all that. But if you could choose one part of the process of audio description, what is your favorite part of the process to participate in?

Dr. Joel Snyder
Oh, my. Well, I teach audio description, and I think I mentioned the Audio Description Institute as part of the ADP. In fact, we have our 25th Audio Description Institute, week after next in late March of 2025. We have a faculty of five, six people, two or three people who are blind on the faculty. The Institute focus is mostly on the writing of description. We do spend some time talking about and practicing with the voicing of description. There are basically three aspects to audio description production: the writing, the voicing and the audio editing. So it's tough for me to choose between the writing and the voicing, which is the area that I love most or something, because I don't personally do the writing of description for too much these days because I'm away training or traveling and such and speaking. But I hire people who have been trainees of mine. I have at least half a dozen writers who do freelance writing for me, and I oversee that. I voice a lot of the description that comes out of my own shop, Audio Description Associates. But we're a small company, really, and I use female voice talents. I use blind voice talents an awful lot, too. But we keep it small because I don't want to become a factory of audio description, churning it out. We're a little more specialized. And then the audio editing is something that is beyond me, really. I know enough about it to be dangerous. That's it. But still today, when you say audio editing to me, I think of a reel-to-reel tape and a razor blade. That's because I did a little bit of that thing when I was a kid, and that's how you did audio editing. But it's all digital, of course, has been for years.

Dr. Joel Snyder
I have a marvelous group in the DC area called Dominion Post that does most of my editing. You guys probably Tristan Snyder, who's in Minneapolis now. He does audio editing for me. He's totally blind. He also does voicing of audio description. Some of the best voice talents for audio description are totally blind. Some of the best audio editors are totally blind. And more and more, audio description producers are doing what they should have been doing from the very beginning, is using people who are blind who know audio description. It's not just that you're blind, it's that you have that perspective and you really know description, like a Tristan, like an Alex Howard, like a Lee Pugsley. Those people are top consultants, quality control consultants. And some even do the -- quote unquote, do the "writing" with an accommodation of maybe a sighted person who's filling them in on some images. There's absolutely no reason why a blind person can't be a tremendous writer and know about language. They need access to the visual images. That's another part. It's an accommodation, if you will. I don't know. The writing is probably where I spend most of my time speaking about description and training describers, but the vocal skills are very much a part of it. 99% of all description is aural, A-U-R-A-L, he points to his ear, and oral, O-R-A-L, he points to his mouth. I have had, on occasion, done a couple of films where the audio of the film and the audio description was brailled. So it was then made accessible that way to a deaf, blind user who was essentially reading the film as it went along. So that's an example of audio description that's not audio, but that's relatively rare.

Lee Pugsley
Definitely. And yeah, on a side note, we actually have had Tristan on our podcast a few times, I think twice now.

Dr. Joel Snyder
Yeah, he's great. Absolutely. By the way, just as a one other side note, I just came back from speaking at the CSUN conference, the Assistive Technology Conference in Los Angeles. And my presentation was all about AI and AD, for good or ill. And I think there's no denying that artificial intelligence, we are on the cusp of its dominance in so many areas of life, including description. But I don't think we're there yet. I think the algorithms that are being developed to write description, even for a still image, much less a film of moving pictures, the algorithms for that and the algorithms for text to speech, for speech synthesis, have a lot to learn, or they need to be tweaked so that they incorporate best practices. Because when I do this presentation about AI, I do use AI to describe an image. I use AI to voice description, and it just doesn't compare to what a human brings, the nuances and subtleties that a human can bring to the writing and to the voicing of description. It's not a matter of just the voice sounding human. It's taking that human sound and making meaning with it. And that's something that is, I think, still uniquely human. AI is going to get better and better and better, and hopefully with an understanding of those best practices.

Lee Pugsley
Yeah, I agree. The nuances make a huge difference. Like you said, AI can be technically good at creating description, and probably as the algorithm continues, it'll get there, but still the human touch, nothing can recreate that.

Dr. Joel Snyder
I think that's right. I think that's right. We'll, you know, 20 years from now, five years from now, whatever, we'll see where we're at and go from there.

Lee Pugsley
Exactly. Well, Joel, this has been such a It was a wonderful conversation. Alex and I could talk for hours with you about so many different topics.

Dr. Joel Snyder
Oh, I know. You and me both. Absolutely.

Alex Howard
So I think--

Dr. Joel Snyder
Your podcast is great.

Lee Pugsley
Oh, thank you.

Alex Howard
Did you want to plug anything?

Dr. Joel Snyder
Oh, my goodness. Well, I mentioned the Audio Description Project. Let me make sure that website is out there. It's simply adp.acb.org. Everything you wanted to know about audio description but were afraid to ask or something like that. My book actually was published by the American Council of the Blind in 2014, The Visual Made Verbal: Comprehensive Training Manual and Guide to the History and Applications of Audio Description. It's available on Amazon. It's available through the ACB. It's available in seven languages now. In print, it's available in Braille. It's on Bard. It's available as two audiobooks as well from the Library of Congress. So, yeah, that's an easy way. It's designed to give you a lot of information, and actually it's aligned with a website that I created, so you could go to the website and actually practice doing description.

Alex Howard
Oh, that's amazing.

Dr. Joel Snyder
There you go.

Alex Howard
I did not know that. That's really cool. Then I am actually hoping to take your... What do you call it?

Dr. Joel Snyder
Oh, the Institute?

Alex Howard
Yes, the Institute.

Dr. Joel Snyder
Oh, that'd be great. We welcome you because we learn from each other. Boy, having you in the Institute would be just wonderful. I think you'd get something out of it, but we all would.

Alex Howard
Yeah, thank you.

Dr. Joel Snyder
Absolutely.

Alex Howard
But yeah, thank you so much for being on the show. 

Dr. Joel Snyder
You bet. Thank you for having me. 

Lee Pugsley
Yeah. Definitely be sure to check out Joel's book. And if you have any questions or comments for us or about anything that we've discussed today with Joel, feel free to reach out to us at DarkRoomFilmCast@gmail.com. Once again, that's DarkRoomFilmCast@gmail.com. And you can also follow us on YouTube and Instagram @DarkRoomFilmCast.

Alex Howard
Yeah, and we'd like to thank Matt Lauterbach at All Senses Go for making the transcriptions of this episode possible, as well as BlindCAN for helping out with the editing.

Lee Pugsley
Well, thank you guys so much, and we'll see you back here next time on The Dark Room.

Alex Howard
Thanks, guys.