Standard techniques in audio description

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At present, there are no standards for audio description. The conference of Audio Description International in March 2002 may change that.

Basic details are as follows (but see the official site):

Audio Description International Conference Invitation

March 23–24, 2002 at the John F. Kennedy Center For The Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

Registration fee is US$50 prior to January 31, 2002 and US$100 after. Contact:

Accessibility Program
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
2700 F Street N.W.
Washington, DC 20566-0001
+1 (202) 416-8727 voice
+1 (202) 416-8728 TTY
access@kennedy-center.org

What we need

At the very least, we need to conclude the conference having agreed on general techniques. It is too much to expect any kind of standardization, training, or certification at this early stage.

Terminology and process

Audio Description International needs to understand the terminology used in standardization for all industries:

Standards are what you’re supposed to do.
Training teaches you how to do it.
Certification covers a training regimen or actual work and verifies the standards have been met.

We can call these the Three Components.

The industries with the Three Components already in place usually:

have been around for decades
are licensed or regulated by local laws
do not function via volunteer labour
have relatively enormous budgets

Just as examples, in Ontario, engineers, architects, interior designers, nurses, doctors, dentists, pharmacists, and graphic designers are all regulated. These are longstanding professions with large memberships – 64,744 professional engineers in Ontario alone.

Nonetheless, a few established industries have none of the Three Components, or only one. Included in this list are three of the five arms of accessible media – captioning, subtitling, and dubbing. (There are standards for Web accessibility; it is debatable whether or not there is certification, and there is no uniform training. The fifth arm of accessible media is audio description itself.)

Where to start

It may be biting off more than we can chew at this early stage to hope for any of the Three Components. Captioning has been around for nearly 30 years, dubbing and subtitling for nearly a century; none of those industries has any of the Three Components.

That’s why I am proposing we start small – with a nonbinding declaration of standard techniques in audio description.

Later on, A.D.I. can follow a course of action like this:

Strike committees and develop a budget
- Committees will be a problem because Audio Description International has very few members. It is possible that only a few people will volunteer, and/or that they will burn out, and/or that they will have too much to do already, and/or that they will lack qualifications or general suitability, and/or will do a Microsoft and attempt to influence the standards in their unique favour.
- A.D.I. will need a budget because not everything can be done for free online. (Braille, audiotape, and postage all cost.) Further, another miniconference on these topics may be needed.
- Time allocation: 1 month to decide on committee structure and members.
Begin with standards
- Start a committee that will consult on and produce a standards document.
- Time allocation: Give everyone three months to arrive at a draft.
- Put it to a vote. A mail-in vote is not particularly difficult to run, especially for an organization with 50 to 100 members.
- The standards will then be official or ratified.
Begin the process for training and certification
- Time allocation: Highly tentative. Start with one year to come up with a training program, two years after that for certification.

Philosophy of “standard techniques”

This list of techniques is offered as something an organization like Audio Description International could adopt or ratify in the way international conferences adopt or ratify statements or resolutions. The adoption would be nominal and non-binding, with no enforcement mechanism. In effect, adopting the techniques would act as a gesture, an indication that audio description is actually rule-governed and is not self-explanatory and that the nascent audio-description industry can agree on baseline measures.

Only later would we develop training programs and certification or testing schemes. Agreeing on basic techniques is where we would need to start; only much later on, after considerable further discussion, would this declaration of standard techniques be improved on, enlarged, and transformed into separate standards, training, and certification programs.

We are not talking about standards, training, and certification programs in this section. As explained above, those are prolonged processes that require time, expertise, and money.

Definitions

Some quick definitions are in order.

describer: The person who writes or generates the descriptions, whether in advance or live on the spot.
narrator: The person who speaks the descriptions aloud. Can be the same as the describer, and can theoretically be a machine using speech output.
production: The single, discrete artwork being described – a play, a television program, a dance performance, a film, a photograph. Describing a complete television series, by contrast, involves a sequence of productions.