Audio description (AD) ensures that people who are blind or have vision loss enjoy meaningful access to media. Artificial intelligence (AI) promises myriad possibilities for AD production—but are they for good or ill? Or both?
This presentation will examine how the writing and the voicing of AD can be affected. First, focusing on an AD script, the session will offer AD for Jackson Pollock’s abstract work Convergence as developed by a professional audio describer according to well-established AD best practices for the description of visual art. The script will then be analyzed/compared with AD produced by AI (Chat GPT v4.0). Its voicing by a human AD voice talent will also be contrasted with the same script as voiced using text-to-speech (TTS) speech synthesis.
A brief excerpt from a video will be screened with emphasis on the voicing of the AD by TTS (as offered by a professional AD producer) and then compared to the voicing of the AD by a human voice talent.
Is the power of AD dependent on or enhanced using writing and speech/oral interpretation techniques/nuances provided by human analysis and production?
Presenter
Dr. Joel Snyder
President, Audio Description Associates, LLC; Founding Director Emeritus, American Council of the Blind (ACB) Audio Description Project (ADP)
Dr. Joel Snyder is known internationally as one of the world's first "audio describers," a pioneer in the field of Audio Description. Since 1981, he has introduced audio description techniques in over 40 states and 64 countries and has made thousands of live events, media projects, and museums accessible. Most recently, Dr. Snyder was named a Fulbright Scholar to train audio describers in Greece and Ukraine over a four-week period in 2019.
In 2014, the American Council of the Blind published Dr. Snyder's book, The Visual Made Verbal – A Comprehensive Training Manual and Guide to the History and Applications of Audio Description, now available as an audio book and in braille from the Library of Congress, in screen reader accessible formats, and in English, Polish, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Chinese print editions.
