We’ll be talking a bit about visual/audio description. I’m asking you to create a description of your comic for those who cannot see it or have issues processing visual information. Your description will be posted to your blog alongside your comic and Author’s Note.
A visual or audio description allows those with limited vision, or other visual perception issues, to understand what your comic is all about. Unlike your Author’s Note, the goal of visual description isn’t to interpret your comic, but to describe it. Then the reader can interpret it on his/her own, like any one else who views the comic. (Then they can read your Author’s Note if they like.)
We’ll go over some of these examples in class, but they’re here on the blog for your later reference as you write your visual description. Note that one issue with some of the videos I’ve linked below is that they are not captioned – so while they are made accessible for those with vision issues, they aren’t accessible for those with hearing issues. There really isn’t any reason they couldn’t have been made accessible to both audiences at once, and we’ll talk about this more in the next unit, which focuses on audio.
- A brief definition of visual description from the American Council of the Blind
- An example of a visual description of a photo (at top of the website)
- A description of a museum tour with visual/audio descriptions of the art (one of many such tours at museums)
- VSA video with audio descriptions
- Short video of the haunted house at Disneyland with audio descriptions
- Sight Unseen museum exhibit
- TV promotion for audio description with blurred visuals
- Written and audio descriptions of art
