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Audio description (AD) makes live and recorded performances come alive for blind and low-vision audiences. By narrating visual details—actions, settings, costumes, and more—it helps everyone fully experience theater, film, and other art forms. AD is now common in many movie theaters and on certain TV services, and it is gradually expanding into live theater.
There, the description is often professionally produced and generally available for any performance once a show has been running for a while. These performances feature pre-recorded AD: individual sound clips carefully cued to match each moment, like any other sound cue, and synchronized with the performance through the miracles of modern technology. At the Broadway performances, the description ran through a provided tablet and earpiece, and at the touring performance it ran through a free app on my phone called GalaPro.
Little Rock, Arkansas, where I live, offers more live theater than one might expect, and many local theaters provide live AD for at least one performance of each production. I became personally involved in 2019, helping the Arkansas Repertory Theater implement AD. Our first internal test in early 2020 was fantastic. Then the pandemic abruptly halted the season. After retiring from full-time teaching in 2023, she launched Creative Descriptions, a business dedicated to organizing and promoting AD throughout central Arkansas. She puts together listings of upcoming theater performances and emails this information to potential attendees. Once she knows a person has tickets, she sends show notes and all of the other details, such as what time to show up and where to meet her for the equipment.
Before the show, stage manager Luisa Torres led a memorable touch tour, letting us handle key props and set pieces so we could visualize their use during the performance. Touch tours like this add a deeper layer to audio description. This part of the AD usually contains information from the playbill and provides detailed descriptions of the set, characters, costumes, and other pertinent details that couldn’t be included in the AD during the performance because of the obvious time constraints. If this pre-show AD is a recording, it usually plays on a loop starting around twenty minutes before the show begins.
Read the Full Article: Equal Access to Live Theater: Opening New Worlds through Audio Description and Touch Tours
By: Cindy Scott-Huisman
