Anything and everything to do with the craft of writing and recording audio description for film, television and theatre.
Introduction
I'm Brett. I'm an “indie” audio description writer from Australia.
Audio description is an accessibility feature so people who are blind or low-vision can experience the performing arts by including a “narration” track, describing what is going on, mostly in-between the dialogue. It also includes descriptions of national parks, artwork, book covers and museum exhibits.
When I first became interested in audio description, I wondered where the conversation was happening.
I'm from a programming background, and in programming and information technology in general, the conversation is happening everywhere, all the time. Tech people blog, they make podcasts, they go on forums and social media and tell everyone what they love about new software, software that's 30 years old and still useful, whether you should use Vim or Emacs, Rust or C++, JSON, XML, YAML or TOML.
But with audio description, I couldn't find much. There's the usual social media: facebook, twitter, linkdin, mastodon and so on. There's a mailing list. There's some excellent podcasts.
But it feels to me, as someone used to continual conversation about solving interesting problems and novel technologies, that it was pretty quiet. Especially among professionals: the people who make rather than consume.
So, that's what this blog is designed to mitigate a little. I'll post bits and pieces, thoughts and links, brilliant ideas and arrant nonsense.
I do have a website already, but it's aggressively structured as “Not A Blog” and I think it's the wrong place for material in this format.