Expect to see some shows joining the rotation next week including Yellowjackets (fri/Paramount Plus), Cobra Kai (thurs/Netflix), and the Masked Singer (Wed/FOX) which never ports audio description to Hulu. Movies next week include a 4th Bridget Jones movie and an animated Witcher film on Peacock and Netflix respectively.
TV Shows Watched: Apple cider Vinegar: S1E2 (Netflix) with audio description, the traitors: S3E7 (Peacock) with audio description, Harley Quinn: S5E4 (MAX) with audio description, Dexter: Original Sin- Penultimate Season Episode (Paramount Plus) with audio description, the Z Suite: S1E1 and S1E2 (Tubi) with audio description, Are you Smarter Than A Celebrity: S1E14 (Amazon), Matlock: S1E8 (Paramount Plus) with audio description, Celebrity jeopardy: S3E5 (Hulu) with audio description, Abbott Elementary: S4E14 (Hulu) with audio description, and the Daily Show: Thursday (Paramount Plus) no audio description.
best Episode: Apple Cider vinegar- the lies are piling up. Will the audience? Is the next Netflix phenomenon? it has all the makings of one.
runner Up: The Traitors- As an episode, just an episode, I love The Traitors. the challenge this week was fun, and the elimination was a long time coming.
Best Performance: Boston Rob (The traitors)- Man, he really tried to be a master manipulator and use his years of skills having been on a ton of competition reality shows to try and win. he played what he thought was his best game, but, to be known as one of the most dangerous players in terms of his potential, the deck was always stacked against him. he needed to appear weak and vulnerable a lot more, in order to stick around.
runner up: The Series Regulars Of Abbott elementary- Again, one of the strongest ensembles, and they all had their moments to make me laugh this episode.
Best Audio Description/Best Moments Of Audio description: Pause.
Yesterday, i penned an open letter to ViTac, begging them to either make better audio description or get out of the game.It came from yet another really glaring problem with their audio description for the Traitors, which I’m convinced is neither narrated by a human, nor is it quality checked. Two episodes after the narrator read “Beau B” instead of Bob, not knowing how to ignore a typo, this week, we ended on an egregious misfire. The narrator pronounced the word agape, like “her mouth agape”, but pronounced it like it rhymes with agave. I don’t even know how to type that phonetically. Ah-Ga-Pei? That worked with my screen reader. Maybe it does for yours.
right now, I’m on an iPad, running iOS, so my accessibility is voiceover, and the screen reading technology is provided by Apple. I can modify the speaking voice, the rate, i can do a lot of things with this accessibility. if I don’t like it, i can buy a different product, that dos the same thing, but runs different technology with different screen recognition tools. this is true on my computer, I got tired of jaws constantly asking me to update, so i typically just use the Windows option. it isn’t the best, but it is there. I can also always choose to run Jaws, purchase Jaws, or get something like NVDA.
I prefer Roku devices. I don’t want to completely cave into the cult of Apple, so i like to spread my accessibility around. Roku certainly has its faults, but I know if it ever fails me, I can get a Fire Stick, or Apple TV. Hell, I still have an XBOX, and I can run my streaming apps off that, since Windows has a narrator on there.
I have an Apple Watch, but it certainly isn’t the only one in the game. I had an old Fitbit that didn’t talk to me, and I wanted a fully accessible watch and made the switch a few years ago. I typically buy any digital copies from the Apple Store, just because it is where I have the most. but, I do pay attention to Fandango At Home and Amazon, just in case the audio description jumps over Apple. And if I really want to make sure I never lose audio description, I can always purchase physical media when listed with audio description.
I get my canes from a company in Canada. They’re pretty great, but really want me to have one white section, even if I just want to have a fabulous color cane to show off my pride. I know why, for reflective purposes. White cane laws. but, I do always have a choice. if I don’t like Uber, i can Lyft. So, if the accessibility for one app fails, there’s another. plus, my city has an accessible short bus that will pick me up at my house (for a price). I don’t like spending hours in grocery stores, so i usually do home delivery. There are a host of applications for this, and I’m happy enough with Instacart for now, though I can change.
Why am i bothering to tell you all of this? because access is such a huge part of who we are as disabled individuals, and the tools that we need, which very from person to person, to assist us, are things we frequently rely on. if I didn’t have the accessibility levels I have right now, I don’t know where I would be. Probably hit by a car trying to cross a street without a stick, trying to get somewhere because I couldn’t Uber, because the app had no accessibility, or neither did my phone. Pick one.
Our lives are like a Jenga tower. And when we get a disability, it is like someone comes in at the beginning of the game and removes a bottom piece that seems somehow integral to the tower, yet we don’t fall. We are still standing. why? Often because of the resources we have, which in and of themselves are limited. I can only get the accessibility that is available to me. I am not bezos rich and can’t pay for a team of people to follow me around at all times, performing various tasks as required anytime I don’t have my accessibility needs met. if I’m left out in the cold, I usually just give up, maybe I complain, or I don’t come back. i tend to stick to what is accessible, and advocate by widening that circle as much as possible.
With audio description companies, we are still at a place where the majority of titles do not have audio description. No matter how many titles you think you see on the Audio description project, it pales in comparison to the amount of film and television that has been created since the birth of the camera. And when you rope in content creation on platforms like YouTube, and TickTock, then you are adding more and more content that doesn’t have description.
Every project is different, and with or without description, we will always get different experiences out of them. I can’t change the audio description track to another one. When I watch a film or TV show, I’m lucky enough to have one English Audio Description track. i don’t have choices. I can’t change the voice. i can’t switch service providers, and go to a different company who provided a track for that film. I’m stuck.
So, we in the blind community, especially those without sighted family or friends watching with them, are fully reliant upon what you give me. If you get the wrong character entrance, or the wrong character death, mix up the names, forget to tell us something important, I may never know. I may never know you made a mistake. So, when i catch something that is one, i kind of have to wonder how many I wasn’t able to catch. what else did I miss? And, I can’t just change from Android to Apple, from Roku to fire stick, Lyft to Uber. If you are a writer, narrator, quality check, sound engineer, or audio description executive, we live and die by what you put on that track.
So when I hear a company that is clearly making the worst possible audio description, I don’t just take a pause, i have to say something. Because, this stuff is oddly really important. Sure, right now it is the Traitors. What happens when a company that is perfectly fine with doing the very least gets asked to do something important? like, provide audio description for the news? or educational resources for children? Suddenly, the quality of audio description for a reality show doesn’t seem so insignificant, does it? because if a company is fine cutting corners here, why not somewhere else? And I hate to tell you, but in an age of wildfires and tornadoes, I’d really like to know if one is headed my direction. I would like to trust that those given the most pertinent information and the most important information feel the gravity of what it is they do. And, if they are already willing to put out an audio track of this quality, then I’d rather they just get out of the game. they’ve been picking up more and more programs, and I assume they are a low cost option.
Cutting corners on accessibility shouldn’t help you sleep at night. profiting from my disability shouldn’t make you a better person. If you are in this field because you’re a greedy son of a bitch, then you are in the wrong vocation. No matter what your disability is, the one thing that is true for all of us is that we rely on some form of access or accessibility, some more than others. but, still, accessibility. I mean, honestly, what do you think your reading glasses are? If your doctor kept giving you the wrong prescription for reading glasses, so they weren’t working, how would something as simple as that affect your life?
It does matter. it matters a hell of a lot. So, whether you work at ViTac, or somewhere else, please always remember that what you do matters to people. Without the work you do, we would lose access. And, in a climate where more and more people hear the words diversity, equity, and inclusion, and think it is the devil’s work, now is the most important time to stand up and make this world as inclusive as possible. for the kids being born congenitally blind today, we have an opportunity to make this the best generation of disabled individuals with the most access ever. But everywhere you look, companies can’t seem to run fast enough. even while we have the most technology, and the smartest AI, because of a political climate that has become attached to the word “inclusion”, we might actually regress.
There has never been a better time to be more inclusive, to celebrate the diversity, and promote equity. And if you are here doing it for the right reasons, great. But as our chances for accessibility in the near future start to wane, it starts to become really important that the best possible accessibility is provided when it is commissioned, especially in the cases of shows and films where we don’t have any other option but to listen to your track, which could be full of mistakes and falsities, and we would potentially never know the difference. But, what if that same company became in charge of telling you that a tornado is five minutes from your house, and instead of saying it was headed NorthEast, they put in just North, and you figured you were out of its path.
This shit matters.
(P.S.- I have a typo early on. I left it. The funny thing is that it perfectly highlights what I’m talking about, because to a sighted person, they saw it, wrote it off as me not checking, but knew what that word should be, and kept reading. For a blind person using a screen reader, you got the message. You figured it out. You know what didn’t figure out that was a typo? The screen reader. The AI. The fake voice, kinda like the one that doesn’t know how to pronounce agape.)
