Audio Description (part 6) - Katie Ellis

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John Simpson 0:30

Hello and welcome to New Horizons Summer Series. I'm John Simpson. As we continue with our summer series focusing on audio description, my guest this week is Professor Katie Ellis, who is with the Centre for Culture and Technology at Curtin University. Katie, we might start by talking a little bit about the Centre for Culture and Technology. What does that involve? And what's your involvement with that?

Katie Ellis 0:56

Sure, so the Centre for Culture and Technology really came about through a research interest in looking at how cultural practices are changing in relation to digital technology and digital platforms in areas like accessibility, health communications, intimacy, social life, popular culture and so on, things like that. So what really motivated us was to better connect the study of the internet and digital culture with cultural studies. So we are a research centre that's located within the Faculty of Humanities at Curtin. So we do a lot of research into how people use digital technologies and the Internet, not necessarily how the Internet itself works. 

So what our focus on over the last five years has been focusing on socially just Digital Futures. So as I said, the way we can make digital cultures more accessible to different people, like people with disabilities, indigenous people, children and youth, diverse genders, diverse sexualities. So really looking at how these groups might use digital technologies. So

John Simpson 2:15

So Audio Description, how does that fit into the broader programs of the centre?

Katie Ellis 2:20

Sure. So I'm Director of the Centre, but I also lead a research program within the center called Digital disability, and the way that program really came about was through my personal experiences with disability and kind of a real dissatisfaction with the way people with disabilities represented in media and popular culture. And so I was, you know, I've done a lot of work in the past about representations of disability in the media. 

And really, for me, audio description came about through attending the other film festival in Melbourne one year. So I was there really to look at representations of disability in that festival, and I noticed audio description happening at this festival, and I'd never actually come across audio description before that point. So there was, you know, people sort of in a room at the back describing what you could see on the screen. And there were people with vision impairments in the audience, you know, with headphones on, experiencing these films with the sighted people. And I thought this is, you know, really interesting direction to take for the next step in my work on on disability and the media. 

And at that same time, I was doing some research on the switch to digital television. And it was sort of my premise that I thought, well, with digital television, we might get more access to more types of representation. We might see better representation of people with disability on television if we're moving to this new technology, this new platform. So I really started to think about access to and John, I think reading your work, I came across an argument that perhaps with the shift to digital television, it might be a good time to start including audio description on our screens as well.

John Simpson 4:18

I want to touch on your more recent work in relation to audio description. I was very pleased to be an audience member for the symposium on audio description that you and the university hosted a little while ago. And you might tell our listeners a little bit about that symposium, what it covered, and most particularly what you saw as the takeout messages from that symposium.

Katie Ellis 4:47

Okay, so that that symposium was part of a larger research project that we're doing within the Center for Culture and Technology, looking at audio description and what we're. Really looking at in our research project is past, present and future of audio description. So we've, as I mentioned, we've done a lot of work on audio description on television, looking at the switch to digital television. As we said, that despite hopes that didn't result really more audio description on television. 

We've looked, we've done research on subscription video on demand, and also as a member of the audio description working group back in 2017 so to this point, the research is really focused on television for us, and in this project, what we are hoping to do is look at audio description in a number of other arenas. So we want to look at audio description in live events. We want to look at audio description in sport, art, circus, Fringe Festivals, everything. So what we're doing is we're gathering together, you know, examples of where audio description has been used in these different areas in the past, we want to look at what people want from audio description. 

Now, we want to look at if there are any standards that we should put in place around audio description, what it should sound like, what needs to be included, things like that. We want to look at how we might be able to teach people to audio describe. Now I work in a university, and I work in the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry. So here in this school, we teach people film production, we teach radio, we teach theater, we teach art. So I think we're in a really great place to start teaching our next generation of media makers and artists about audio description, what it is. So we would... like to come up with some courses around this within the university as as part of the research project. 

And we're also really interested in new technology, and what new technology might mean for audio description, if we can leverage any types of new technology to make audio audio description more available to people who need it. So the symposium was really structured around those three key ideas, past, present and future of audio description. And we invited people who do work on audio description on television in dance. We had an amazing presentation from someone who audio describes dance. 

We really tried to bring in all those different arenas where audio description can provide access to people with low vision, but one of the key takeaways from the symposium, for me was the opportunity around audio description. We had fantastic engagement from people who use audio description, but also from the industry, so people who create the audio description, and for me, I thought that was really the wonderful moment in the symposium where we got to hear from them about how they're approaching this task, and how they want to hear from the community and what they think should happen next. 

So one of the presentations was about audio description in art and the different approaches that could be taken. So here at Curtin, we have a an art gallery called the John Curtin Gallery, and following our first symposium, we they put on an accessible tour using audio description. So after that tour, we then held a symposium where we got some of the audio describers to come back and talk about their different approaches to describing art.

John Simpson 8:53

And Katie, another aspect of the symposium that I was particularly interested in was the presentation about linking audio description to exercise and to the sort of... TV based or video based exercise programs and so forth. That was fascinating, wasn't it?

Katie Ellis 9:18

I think what we found during COVID was how important these exercise videos are to a lot of people, but also how difficult they are to follow. So it's what Polly did in that presentation. Was read aloud the descriptions from the video, and she said to people in the room, if you want to, if you want to try and do these exercises while I'm reading this, you can, but you don't have to. And what we saw in the room was every single person doing a different thing, and that really demonstrated how hard it is to just follow the audio from the exercise video and how they're... necessary audio description is, if you're a person using these exercise videos for exercise.

John Simpson 10:07

Let's talk more broadly about the roll out of audio description on broadcast television, streaming services and so on. What's your sense of the progress that we're making in that area. I mean, SBS have done some great things. ABC have done some great things, but we're a long way short of the mark, aren't we?

Katie Ellis 10:28

Yeah, absolutely. I think ABC and SBS have done some great things, and we we've seen progress in the sense that it was first rolled out on broadcast, and now they're looking at putting it on their on demand platforms launching soon. And I think it's a definite commitment from the public broadcasters to continuing audio description on their television. But what I think we need to see is the commercial stations also making this commitment that you know, they have an audience that requires audio description. 

I think the main block would be the fear of the cost that they believe it is a significant cost to them, but I think they shouldn't be thinking about that. I think they need to start thinking about the opportunities to attract more of an audience. There's content that comes into Australia that's described there's content that's described for other releases, content described for streaming platforms. Previously, we used to have content that was described for DVD and cinema release that never saw the light of day on broadcast stations. 

So there's, you know, there's a lot of content around. Well, I think that's what came out of the audio description working group, is that the commercial stations believed it to be a government expense. But something that our research has found is that consumers don't believe this to be a government government expense. They believe it, it be something that broadcasters and providers should provide, and they should do it to a good quality.

John Simpson 12:10

Katie, just before we finish, though, I want to come back to your own work at the at the Center for culture and technology. What's what's the future there? What are your big projects coming up?

Katie Ellis 12:22

Okay, so a big project I've got coming up is next year, I'll be starting a four year project looking at digital technologies and how people with disabilities use digital technologies to communicate during COVID, and how we saw a lot of innovation during that time. And so what my research will be looking at is what we can learn from that, how we can have better health communications, for example, going forward for people with disabilities and people without disabilities. 

So we'll be looking at health education. I will be looking at entertainment and audio description of what, what people was, how people were using audio description, using digital platforms during that time, is something I'll look at. I do want to do some work looking at how the arguments we make about audio description get tied to specific moments in time or specific technological change. So we started this conversation where I said, you know, I thought with the shift to digital television, we might see a change. We didn't. We've had similar arguments around subscription video and demand. 

So I just want to look at at how technology is changing and how that might impact on the availability of audio description and other communication features for people who communicate in different ways or who might need accessibility.

John Simpson 13:50

A final reminder to our listeners that if you want to contact Blind Citizens Australia, you can phone them on 1 800 zero, double three, double six 0 ...   1 800 033 660, or email bca@bca.org.au ... Until we next speak, this is John Simpson for New Horizons.

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