Francois and Victoria - Audio Description

00:05 S1

This is Studio 1 on Vision Australia Radio.

00:13 S2

Hello, I'm Sam.

00:14 S3

And I'm Lizzie.

00:15 S2

And this is Studio 1, your weekly look at life from a low vision and blind point of view - here on Vision Australia Radio.

00:20 S3

This week we give you everything you want to know about audio description.

00:25 S2

We are joined by Francois Jacobs, who is one of the two audio description reviewers at SBS, as well as Victoria Hunt, the manager for Access and media Services, also at SBS.

00:37 S3

As we always say at this point, please do get in touch with the show. Whether you have experience of any of the issues covered on this week's episode of Studio One, or if you think there's something we should be talking about. You never know. Your story and insight may help someone who's dealing with something similar.

00:53 S2

Please email us studio one at Vision Australia. Org. That's studio number one at Vision Australia.

00:58 S3

Org or of course, you can drop us a note on our Facebook page by going to facebook.com Slash Radio network. work.

01:06 S2

So, Lizzie, on this fine day, how are you?

01:09 S3

I'm good. Thank you. And yourself?

01:11 S2

Yeah. It's been an interesting week, I've got to admit. This... I'm working on another project at the moment, which I have to sort of keep my own counsel on at the moment, but that's been kind of keeping me rather busy. And plus, I mean, there's this also this elephant we might as well get rid of that's been sitting in the room that is... we had an election over the weekend and, well, it's that was one interesting result. Even I didn't think that was going to happen.

01:38 S3

Well, I'd been keeping an eye sort of on things beforehand and they, you know, Labor were expected to win, but I didn't know it was going to be such a landslide victory. One thing I did find very cool this time around, which I didn't actually know about before, was the fact that blind and low vision people, or people that weren't going to be available to do so on the day, can go and vote early. So we found an early voting centre and toddled off a couple of days beforehand and did that and that was quite convenient because I was pretty disposed on the day, predisposed on the day.

02:11 S2

So you didn't avail yourself of the phone voting system?

02:13 S3

No, I didn't... I'd actually had some trouble with that in the past. I registered about a week before one of the elections, and I never got the registration code, and I got fined because I wasn't able to vote and I wasn't able to get to a polling booth at that particular time.

02:30 S2

We're not talking about things like that, though the election most likely was covered on SBS. We have... Francois Jacobs and Victoria Hunt from SBS, and they... we talked to them, only a day or so ago, and they gave us pretty much everything we wanted to know or even wondered about... the audio description on television. I mean, I certainly learned a lot. I mean, is there do you think there's something that... any questions that you were burning to ask or that you didn't even think of that... ended up coming out?

02:59 S3

Well, one thing I was very curious about was the whole process of, you know, once you pick a program to be audio described, the whole process of coming up with a script and then going through, like Francois or his colleague Sally, who was talked about and doing the whole review. And I just think that would be a really cool job to have to sit there and listen to someone who's written a script, actually talk it out in real time in the movie and go, No, no, no, you know, we got to go back, we got to describe this better. I think that's such an amazing job. And just knowing how quickly they can get that process done is amazing.

03:35 S2

Mhm. It's almost a dream job I got to admit I wouldn't mind doing that myself. But I mean the first thing we asked to start things off was, well to Francois - and that was, What is it you do?

03:48 S4

So... I am a, I guess you call it a quality advisor, blind, low vision perspective along with some these another quality advisor, just like myself. And it's also... a script writer and a voice narrator for audio description who is blind or low vision.

04:07 S2

Do you have a visual impairment yourself?

04:08 S4

I'm blind, yes.

04:09 S2

I'll sound like... a million able bodied people and say you don't look it. So... good on you, mate. I know if it frustrates the, well, living wotsit's out of all of us when people say that, I've got to admit. But anyway. So, Victoria, tell us a little bit about yourself.

04:23 S5

I manage access services essentially for SBS, so I manage captioning, audio description, also subtitling for SBS programming. And... we recently did a proof of concept on signing, but that's that's not ongoing whereas the other three services are. So yeah, that's my remit at SBS.

04:40 S3

And how long have you been in that role?

04:42 S5

I've... went to SBS in 2019, which was... people might recall the government gave their approval for the... funding for the SBS trial, for the ad trial for SBS and the ABC, in December 2019. So, you know, starting out was really the big thing to start out with. The big meaty project was to get ad up and running... in 2020.

05:06 S2

So yeah, tell us about that. I mean, it was something that sort of suddenly, from our point of view, just suddenly appeared on the ABC and SBS? I'm presuming it wasn't as sudden for you guys.

05:15 S5

Oh, well, look, I mean, it's interesting because really, that was the result of, you know, everybody lobbying and agitating for, you know, too many years to get that service up and running. Previously we'd had... you might recall there had been trials... via SBC view and... a brief amount of sort of trial on SBS in previous years, in fact, had been maybe three previous very short term trials, just kind of looking at how this would work. But then, yeah, the government completely... came to the party, didn't they, in 2019. And... those services were set up. And now the funding for those services has been... rolled into ongoing funding. So, yeah... that's where we're sitting with the audio description service now.

05:57 S2

Well, I've got to admit, I don't actually use it so much myself, but I'm. Lizzie, you can... tell us about the virtues of... audio description, can't you?

06:05 S3

Definitely. It's something that I use a lot when watching movies and TV. I've found it to be quite helpful because I'm totally blind myself, and there is nothing worse than going to a cinema or watching a TV program with your family and not being able to, you know, laugh at the same things as other people do because you don't have that audio feedback.

06:26 S2

Francois, so you are very much a hands on sort of involved with all this. I mean, what things do you take into account when you sort of are handed a brief or I mean, how does all this work?

06:37 S4

As you know, audio description has been around for, like in the world for probably 30 years. The blind, low vision quality... control aspect only came much, much later - in the last few years. In... the United States, that's a really fairly established industry by now. SBS, though, has been the first in Australia... who have involved blind, low vision quality controllers. So essentially when audio description has to be created for a program, they get sighted scriptwriters to do it. And very often that never gets checked by somebody who's blind or low vision - for continuity, for... Is the name mentioned early enough? Do they use the same word to describe describe the same objects? 

Things that if you see something... you might not necessarily know that have I or haven't I described it yet, whereas I am totally dependent on the words that they use. So I will very quickly tell you when are you talking about now, halfway down the program, like if it hasn't been introduced when everybody else knew about this. So we have that unique perspective, like from a blind perspective to make sure that the blind person isn't getting lost in half the story where we have to then reinvent the whole thing in our mind, because what we assume to be the case was proved wrong eventually through the story, because information got revealed to us later in in the process. 

So that's where I come in. Before the audio description gets recorded, I would meet with the... audio description producer online meeting where they play the movie, and the person then would read the script at the exact time, same in the movie that it would be recorded. And then we either just let it go because it's good or we stop. And I might ask them, Is this really what you're seeing? Is this? Or we take a step back and we could then change the script before it gets recorded. So it makes sense and have a real good sense of story for the blind-low vision viewer.

08:46 S3

So from the beginning of the process, like when you first get handed a program to the completion of the audio description, how long does that process take?

08:54 S5

So SBS produces audio description in two different ways. The vast majority of our audio description we send to a vendor and, and they... produce most of that. And we've got a... essentially we say to the business back into SBS for everyone else who has to do other things with the program before it gets on air, we say that's a six week turnaround. That's how long we kind of give for for a program. I mean, obviously that's because we're working at volume - we audio describe 1400 hours of new audio description every year. So, um, you know, that equates to about 27 hours a week. 

So, you know, there's a lot to be audio described. That's why we give the six week kind of turnaround time if we're, um, producing the audio description in-house, which we do for all of our SBS and NITV commissioned content, and for some very high profile programs, we'll produce that in-house. And that's really so that we can add all the, kind of extra things that we want to do... for example, all those programs would have, would be reviewed by the Francois or Sally. Some of those programs might be... scripted by our... blind, low vision scriptwriter. 

There's other processes where, for example, we have a lot of indigenous material. We would want indigenous narrators to narrate the ad for that material. Sometimes we send that material for a kind of a cultural review as well. So there's a bunch of things that we do to our SBS and might be commissioned programs for the audio description that we can't necessarily do at scale because, as I said, there's 27 hours a week. We're not able to apply all of those things to all of those hours, or that six week turnaround time would become, you know, three months or something. 

So when we do something in-house, it depends on how long the program is and also how many descriptions are in there. You know, some programs, as you know, like there's there's plenty of room to add description and others the dialogue is pretty packed. There's not necessarily a lot of room. So it depends on all that as well. But, I guess, you know, I mean, we could turn something around probably... in 2 or 3 days if we really had to, but in order to make sure it would all kind of go well, probably, I'd say about a week for the internal stuff.

11:05 S4

The amount of dialogue is really key to this process, even from the quality control perspective. There's one of the most recent additions to the SPS catalog is a... I would call it a black and white silent slapstick comedy movie called Hundreds of Beavers, which you're welcome to check out. It's really been released with, I think probably just last week. It's under two hours long, but because the whole entire movie, I think there's two lines of dialogue, actual dialogue through the whole movie, and the rest is all descriptions throughout the whole thing. And that took us like seven hours and working at maximum pace. But it was such an amazing process. But that's how long it can take, because there's a lot of descriptions.

11:52 S5

That's just for the review process. Obviously, the scriptwriter had spent like maybe a week writing the script before that. Then the narration would have taken a day, and then the mics on the narration would have taken probably another day. So I don't know if that...  sort of, that we've been a bit bitsy and our answers, but they're sort of quite a lot involved and it depends on what our starting point is. But I hope that sort of answers answers the question. It varies depending on what we're doing.

12:16 S2

Has there been anything that you would classify as a glorious success and anything else that you might have called, I don't know, a spectacular failure when it's come to this? I mean, we all work in broadcasting in some sort of fashion. And sometimes, yes, there are... surprises of both sides.

12:33 S5

Yeah. No, I really hear what you're saying. Well, look, I'll speak to that from the point of view of one of the the initiatives that we've really tried to introduce at SBS is what we're calling Bespoke Audio Description. And the example that Francois just gave for Hundreds of Beavers is... one of those. So obviously, you know, our adventure is... producing, you know, in a way kind of standard, you know, very good but standard audio description for us. But sometimes, we could see in particular with the kind of programming that SBS likes to... show where we sometimes like to push the envelope a bit. We could see that there might be room for perhaps a slightly different approach. 

And so we've tried a few. We've had a few different experiments in this area with Bespoke Audio Description. So I would say, what we're aiming to do with that is to try and have the tone and the... I guess, the tone and the language of the audio description match the tone and the language of the actual program. Right. So we've done a few experiments and they've all been with kind of cultish kind of movies. The one that... Francois just described, we did The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. We did Blue Velvet, we did... Body Double. So we've tried this a few different times. 

And I would say that The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Hundreds of Beavers have been [?totalled] and Blue Velvet have been real successes in that area where I think we've kind of really nailed it, where we've kept to the, you know, the... basic...  precepts of audio description and really fulfilled that brief, but also tried to add something else in - but I also think that there's maybe one or two of those where we're... despite the attempt, we didn't necessarily add anything much to it. So I think there's a couple of examples where for all the extra effort, we didn't necessarily get the result that we were hoping for - but yeah, that's probably the main thing.

14:22 S2

Francois, I also wanted to ask, has there been on when you're reviewing a script or something like that, something that you've just completely missed and it's made it to a later stage of the production than you were expecting?

14:34 S4

Mm, yes. Maybe. Like characters get revealed later on in the process, or maybe the where a place, a setting is actually situated? Fortunately - well, in my experience, I've only been doing this for for the last almost two years now - we've never had something where episode one has already been recorded while we're still working on episode five, so we could then when we discover, Hey, there's something that we've missed in continuity, we can go back and change episode one scripts to make sure that the thread is consistent. The way that we refer to the... location or the person or whatever is inconsistent and doesn't confuse people unnecessarily. So yes, we have... found that, and fortunately it is still before the recording happened.

15:24 S2

Victoria... also, I'm going to ask, I mean have have you, prior to doing what you're doing now had much to do with people with a disability?

15:29 S5

Prior to this, I worked for a caption provider. So... inasmuch as, one of the things that we tried to do then and that we also... are continuing on at SBS, is really wanting to do focus groups to invite... our audience to be able to feedback to us directly on what we're producing. So that's certainly something that... I did previously with Caption Provider and that SBS continue to do now. We do a focus group every six months for audio description, where we invite... as many people as... we can that we've been able to get in contact with that are interested. We got a bunch of names through Vision Australia recently for people to contact and invite. And yeah, to just to get that completely immediate feedback, that's been something that's been really crucial.

16:19 S2

Has there been anything that's actually surprised you? I mean, I mean, if you don't have a disability yourself, doesn't matter how much involvement you have with people like us, there's always going to be something that you go, I hadn't thought about that.

16:29 S5

Yeah. No, I really agree. Well, look, the biggest one really is... actually the learnings that have come out of what Francois and Sally do, which is like of all the initiatives that we've been able to... that has really supported that we've been able to put in place around our audio description. The one that has caused the most fundamental change in how we do things is actually the script review from Francois and Sally's, because it has changed the way that we have our script writers write. 

And in fact, we have recently extended that particular aspect of reviewing scripts we've invited our vendor to... actually, we've set up meetings for all of their writers with either Francois or Sally, and we've kicked that off so that all of their writers also get the benefit of direct feedback from people who are blind or have low vision. And that, to me, has been definitely our biggest and best initiative.

17:21 S2

Francois, I'm going to ask you a similar question: has there been any battlefield or something like that where you've thought, I can't believe people don't know this?

17:30 S4

I don't it's never deliberate that they, like, do things in a certain way, but obviously audio description is based on rules and things. Describe what you see no matter what. That was how it started. So if you have a documentary and in between scene changes, you would have this beautiful, sweeping landscape just as a filler between scenes and then traditionally that would often be described to us, whereas then we, instead we would have been much better off by maybe a post description of what just happened, or introducing who's going to talk next or where. This is because there's not always time. So that kind of putting them in our shoes. It was just an awareness or maybe the lack thereof. 

We find that often scriptwriters are not necessarily friends with or don't know people who are blind and vision impaired. They may or may not come from a captioning background. Really good intentions, but just to kind of live the experience angle that or just knowing somebody that that's missing which we then I guess bring to the to the table. Obvious things like Oh she knocks on the door - like, you can hear it. Why would you say it then? Just gently reminding people that you don't have to think for us, you can just describe things that we wouldn't otherwise know. But we we can think for ourselves if we... the story is not just what people are saying, it's also all the other soundscapes. That's part of the story. And we we pay attention to those.

19:05 S2

I think the best audio description treats, um, drama or documentaries like a radio play. Really. And so the things that can't be... you know, that you're missing out on, then that's the bits you include, the things that we can use, or work out for ourselves, then I think we can work out for ourselves. Yeah.

19:21 S3

So as far as the actual narrators go, I remember reading in that information that you tried to find indigenous narrators and culturally appropriate narrators for subtitles and other programs. Is it hard to find narrators that are appropriate to the culture of the program?

19:39 S5

Do you know what? Working at SBS makes it a little bit easier. So... because at SBS, you know... we have people in the building who are putting out radio programs in 67 languages every week. Because we have just a huge diversity of... backgrounds for people working at SBS, actually, it's been easier than it might have been really, for anyone else. One of our initiatives has been to also try and involve the creators of programs in... the scripts for audio description for their shows. 

So one of the amazing things that has happened for us out of that is, you know, we've had so much buy-in from writers, creators, directors of programs that are working on a co-production with SBS to produce something that we will... get in touch with them and let them know we're going to audio describe their program. We'll send them a reel of narrators, and ask whether there's anyone suitable on there. And we'll also ask them to feedback on our scripts. So... they're really quite involved when it's a, you know, like a commissioned program that we're working with someone on. 

But the really nice thing that's happened is so many of them have said they'll come in and do the... voices for subtitles or whatever else we might have in there. So, you know, we've had a number of times where we've had... show creators come in and do that with us, but also we've got a lot of people to draw on at SBS who've also been generous with their time, who've come in and done culturally appropriate voices for subtitles for us.

21:08 S2

Do you do audio descriptions only in English, or have you done audio description... say, for example, in Creole or any of the other indigenous languages?

21:16 S5

No we haven't. We do subtitling in... indigenous languages, but we haven't done audio description in any other languages. One of the things we always do is... when we're acquiring content, one of our standard requests is that if there is any audio description that comes with that content, could we have it please? And it's the thing that sort of... a little bit surprising and very disappointing is that... there's usually no ID that travels with programs. It's actually really hard for us to purchase audio description with other programs, we always ask, we almost never get it because it's not there. So... we only produce in English. But we always ask for audio description in other languages for programs that we're buying in, in case we're able to... get that and also put that up.

21:58 S2

Well, yeah. I mean, not not not all of us... speak English as a first language. And a very useful sort of service, really.

22:06 S3

If anybody wants to get involved with, like becoming an audio descriptive narrator or in the script writing process, how can they do that?

22:15 S5

Yeah, that's a really interesting question. From our point of view, as I said, we produce it in two different ways. And our... vendor does most of it. So what we produce in-house, we probably... are kind of fully subscribed for contractors to work with us at the moment. I'm always hopeful that we can expand things, but at the moment we're probably sort of about where we should be. But there are existing audio describers who are happy to teach audio description. I guess I would maybe look for audio, audio describers on LinkedIn and see whether or not they're interested. That's certainly how we trained everybody that works with us. 

We... worked with a really well established audio describer, and... she was able to do training for us around the QC, the quality control stuff that Francois and Sally do around narration, around scripting, and in fact, she's trained all of our narrators. So maybe that's a kind of a way to go about it. But yeah, I don't know that that's how we did it, but I'm not sure how how to do that. Otherwise. I'm not aware of any particular kind of course or school.

23:21 S4

This coming Friday, Curtin University is actually holding a audio description symposium where people who are blind or visually impaired. Also, there's some keynote speakers there which I'm particularly looking forward to. I've decided just for my own personal, I guess, professional growth. I look at the, I think it's Audio Description website, in America - they do... retreats where audio and scriptwriters and quality control advisers are being trained. So there are some opportunities. It's still a fledgling industry, especially here. 

But... I'm hoping that maybe one at some point, other free-to-air stations come on board. Or maybe if we eventually get the legislation over the line that... if the quotas for AD gets increased, so should the demand for workers, blind or visually impaired workers in the field. That's my hope.

24:21 S2

Well, yes. I mean, we're kind of stuck with... the two public broadcasters at the moment. I mean...

24:28 S5

I hope you don't feel totally stuck with us, Sam.

24:32 S2

Oh, sometimes we like to... watch other things. I mean... some bad reality TV or... a quiz show or something like that. 

24:40 S3

No. You know what? I'm okay with Keeping Up With the Kardashians not being audio described, thanks Sam.

24:46 S5

Back to your question about... things that are upcoming. I guess I'd just like to make sure everyone knows that... we have launched our ad service on SBS On Demand. We currently have about... well over 570 movies and TV shows - including drama series, documentaries, and the occasional cooking program available with AD on SBS On Demand. Yeah, just really keen that people are aware that that is is definitely in place and available now.

25:13 S2

Is there a particular website that people can go to to actually find what is available, or is it specifically... SBS or the ABC, or is there anything that's sort of, like a third party or something like that?

25:24 S5

So there's two places - we have audio schedule update service on Blind Citizens Australia. It's a phone up service. And we also have... a schedule on the SBS ad program page. They're both updated essentially weekly. But, in terms of finding programming on SBS On Demand, our team has been our digital teams have been working on a lot to do with the access and... making things more easily navigable on On Demand for people who... are kind of coming to us with, you know, just various assistive technologies that they might be using. So things are searchable now for On Demand just by putting in Audio Description. And that will take you actually to the webpage, that to the correct page that will give you all of the stuff that's available and searchable.

26:10 S2

Oh that's great. That's yeah, that's... all we need, really. It's fantastic. All right. Well... Francois and Victoria, thank you so much for joining us. We... will carry on. We look forward to to hearing what you're up to.

26:27 S4

No worries. Happy viewing.

26:28 S3

And of course, we'll have... links to the websites and... appliances in Australia up on the podcast notes so that people can go and find all the the list of audio described programs you have.

26:40 S5

Yeah. That's lovely. Thank you. And yeah, if you're feeling like really going out there, give Hundreds of Beavers a go.

26:45 S3

I might just do that.

26:48 S2

That's a wrap for this week. A big thank you to Francois and Victoria.

26:52 S3

And then, of course, thank you for listening. That includes our listeners on the Reading Radio Network. As usual, you can find this episode plus some extra content on Apple, Spotify, Google or your favourite podcast platform. Next week...

27:07 S2

Mothers' Day arrives on a Wednesday. Just this once we break out the flowers, chocolates and badly made breakfasts in bed.

27:15 S3

We also chat with Lisa, a vision impaired mother, and Sarah Evans about her experiences, and she also shares what support is out there for vision impaired parents.

27:25 S2

Between now and then, please do get in touch with the show. Whether you have experience of any of the issues covered on this week's episode of Studio 1, or if you think there's something we should be talking about, you never know - your story and insight may help somebody else who is dealing with something similar.

27:39 S3

You can email us at studio1@visionaustralia.org - that's studio number one at Vision Australia dot org... or of course you can find us on any of the social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram by searching for VA Radio Network.

27:54 S2

This program was made possible with the support from the Community Broadcasting Foundation. Find out more at CBF.org ...