Thread Subject: teitac-websoftware Proposal fora newUserPreferenceSettings(Non-Visual)

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From: Jasionowski, Tony
Date: Mon, Jul 30 2007 12:35 PM

To: AV Subcommittee,
The recent discussion below in Websoftware may be of interest to some
members in AV, therefore, I included AV in this discussion for any
comments.
Thanks.
Tony Jasionowski
Panasonic
AV Sub Committee Co-chair
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Date: Mon, 30 Jul 2007 11:40:11 -0400
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Subject: Re: [teitac-websoftware] Proposal fora
newUserPreferenceSettings(Non-Visual)
To: "TEITAC Web/Software Subcommittee"
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Cc: "TEITAC Web/Software Subcommittee"
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We get a number of questions from agencies (including my own) about
audio
description. Generally, the videos being created are informational, not

instructional. We've taken the position that if the agency feels the
need
to make the film, they must feel the message is mission-based and
therefore, should be accessible to all.

I would be interested in hearing Don's and Allen's opinions about a
couple
of examples. The first one involved a video my office had made to play
at
booth we were staffing at a government conference. We used a video
produced by filming the previous year's conference which included a
short
film clip from a commercial-hit cartoon movie about prehistoric animals,

including fish. We made it conform to 508 by close captioning and audio

describing the video. It was a two-step process - we first sent it to a

company that created the closed-captions and then to another that added
the audio description.

The audio description added a lot - it described the people who came and

went from the podium and stage, what they carried and what they did.
The
people in filmed from the previous year's conference were all relatively

well-known IT executives from Federal as well as industry. It also
described in detail the fish that went whizzing by the screen in the
cartoon clip - far more data than the average viewer would ever gather
and
even fewer could identify by genus. It also raised some interesting
societal issues - the description labeled one government exec as
silver-haired, another as short and portly and another as thin, tall
black
man. The folks captured in the video seem a bit uncomfortable about the

descriptions - our video gave voice to unspoken "opinions" that created
discomfort for others.

My second example involves an architectural tour of some historic
Federal
office spaces. It was developed in house for Federal employees and was
closed captioned but not audio described. An executive narrated the
film
by, for the most part, sitting in her office on a couch with flowers on
a
nearby table and a flag in the background - a pretty typical executive
pose. She provided the voice-over of the tour and described the
features
of the offices the video depicted as well as the history behind them.
Occasionally, additional images were shown, of Indian chiefs in an
antique
photo, several somber men in late-eighteenth century dress. From her
script, you made a hazy deduction that they attended important events in

these offices but from the description, you wouldn't have known anything

about the participants. The film producers thought that they didn't
need
to audio describe the film because the script read by the exec described

the rooms well.

We generally advise Federal video-producers that it isn't necessary to
audio-describe "talking-heads" - people standing in one place, maybe
behind a podium, just speaking to the camera. Is that good? Should we
be
providing a physical description of the speaker? Can we cross a
proprietary line where we offend by describing physical attributes that
might not be flattering to the speaker and cause other problems? Is
there
anything we can add to the proposed language to address such concerns?

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