Reid My Mind

— Clock Ticking
TR:
–(Yelling in a Filtered, over modulated voice) Times up!

TR:
Well, that was then.

If you’re just tuning in and you don’t know what I’m referring to, please go back and listen to the episode last month titled, Time’s UP!

It’s the latest version of what I’ll call a protest by podcast. My own rage against the machine! That is, the systemic exclusion of narrators of color from audio description.

The episode helps me cope with the feelings; frustration, unfairness, pissed offativity.

— Filtered voice: (Well actually, that’s not a word!)

They know exactly what I’m talking about!

Sometimes you just got to get it out of your system.

today, I’m sticking to the place where I landed. That’s focusing on those who appreciate, respect and promote access that reflects the art of the global majority. Those who believe in tearing down the practice of exclusion in order to create audio description that truly centers the Blind Community… the full, rich, diverse community.

Y’all hear that….
— Birds chirping. begins to raise in volume.

It sounds like a new day is dawning.

I’m Thomas Reid the host and producer of this here podcast…
I told you before; (mischievous hmm) time’s up! There’s a real change underway.

— Reid My Mind Radio Intro

TR:
Allow me to introduce you to the team, out of the UK called Sound Scribe.
First up, Reid My Mind Radio family and alumni, Elaine Lillian Joseph.

Elaine:
I’m a black West Indian woman. Pronouns. She her from Birmingham (Woo!) in the UK. I am in my 30s. Today. I have my hair in a bun, and I wear glasses.
and I’m currently in London, and it’s actually sunny here, which is rare.

TR:
Rare, but fitting.
I told you, it’s the dawning of a new day.

Elaine:
My role in SoundScribe is as a co-founder and principally as an audio describer, also across the kind of project management as well.

So yeah, that’s me. Woo!

TR in conversation with SoundScribe:
And Elaine brought her own Woo. I like that.

Elaine:
I wasn’t going to wait for the Woo’s.

TR in conversation with SoundScribe:
I hear you! I bring my woos wherever I go.

TR:
Let’s keep those Woo’s going for Lesta. L E S T A.

Lesta:
I’m an East Asian woman. I’m Chinese, and I’m visually impaired as well. I’m quite pale with freckles. I have long black, sort of waist length hair in a ponytail. I’m always a little bit glamorous. I’m quite petite, athletic, and my pronouns are, she her.
For sound scribe. I’m basically a consultant. So, I comment on the audio description that is provided, or like I come in quite early to help the derivation of the audio description. And I basically complain a lot. I feel that’s my job, but I also comment on the actual performances as well, and the space that they do it in, as well as how they execute it.

TR:
Complaining can also be called quality control.
We’re talking about a member of the target audience who can provide helpful feedback on the script, narration and mix.
Improving the final product before release.

Next, meet Shivaangee.

Shivaangee:
Or you can call me Shiv. My pronouns are they and she and I am a person in my 30s with heritage from India.

I’m kind of light brown skinned, with black hair, dark eyes. I have two nose piercings in my left nostril. I’m wearing a necklace and more earrings, so some jewelry, and a green netted top for the heat today, and freshly, freshly shaved sides to my hair, which feel great.

I co-founded soundscribe with Elaine, though, I’d say Elaine kind of does a little bit more leadership of in a direction we’re going, and I sort of support with that And some of the project management as well.

I’m actually trained and work as a dance artist, and that’s a really fun collaboration to do with Elaine, because I guess I can bring a little bit of the embodied experience of moving and dancing, and Elaine brings a lot of experience in all thing’s audio description.

TR in conversation with SoundScribe:
shiv, tell me a little bit about how you got into AD.

Shivaangee:
A friend and choreographer called Mira Patel does a lot of work with blind, visually impaired, deaf and hearing-impaired communities in order to understand how Indian classical dance, which is what I’m trained in, and what she’s trained in, can be more accessible for these communities.

So, it was through coming on board to her work that I was trained as an audio describer.

Through that work, I felt like access and accessibility was something I could really relate to on other levels, in other ways that I have experience of marginalization and othering.

I just really deeply connected to the importance of accessibility and how everybody can benefit from disability justice, and it felt like a really foundational area that can inform;
How Indian classical dance can be made more accessible to people who don’t know what Indian classical dance is.
How dance can become more accessible.
How we can start to think about dance without prioritizing the visual sense.
How we can decenter sighted and non-disabled perspectives and dance.

TR:
Shiv isn’t the only dancer in SoundScribe.

Lesta:
I have a background in the arts, so I’m an architect and I’m also a dancer as well at the same time.

I understand space really well, and I understand movement really well.

TR:
Of course Lesta also brings her personal experience with audio description.

Lesta:
When I first became visually impaired as an adult, I started using audio description, and I was just really grumpy about it.

I use audio description with like films and TV and sometimes theater, but it’s just really bad.

I’m just grumpy about the fact that I have to watch so many things that are just really badly described, and therefore I don’t quite understand what’s going on

Because I’m in the UK, it’s called SI, sight impaired, or if your blind, it’s severely sight impaired. I’m Si, so I do have some sight.

It is a choice for me to use my eyes or not.

TR:
Lesta went on to say that the quality really does vary. Sometimes it’s better. But when it’s bad, it’s really bad!

Lesta:
I would prefer to go through the physical pain and also not understanding what’s going on than using audio descriptions.

TR:
Ouch!

TR in conversation with SoundScribe:
Okay, are you still grumpy today? (laughs) I mean about AD. Have you seen any improvement in the state of audio description and what you’re getting in a movie theater?

Lesta:
The difficulty is that quite a lot of film theaters don’t even provide it. So even if it was well done on a film, it’s not provided so you can’t even access it. I would say that is pretty problematic in the UK.

I use Netflix, and sometimes I go for the audio description. It is getting slightly better, so at least they are doing the work to actually describe it well, I just find it quite robotic, because I feel like audio description is effectively a performance. It’s reflection of the art form that you’re kind of viewing, whether it’s dance or theater, film, TV, it’s all part of the performance trip, because you’re kind of describing what you’re viewing.

It has to marry.

TR:
That’s a union between the content and the audio description.

— Sound of a door locking with a wooden latch.

— Music begins, a “house’ inspired, upbeat bouncy bass drum, with crescendo reverse cymbals and finger snaps as snares.

TR:
Now that we’ve met the individuals, let’s find out how they became SoundScribe.

Elaine:
so me and Shiv actually go back to Uni, and then a mutual friend of ours basically put us in touch, and was like, you’re an audio describer and you’re an audio describer.

Me and Shiv went to a dance event that was about audio description and then we went to a pub, and then we just bitched and complained.

Oh, we really have a lot in common, as audio describers, basically, but specifically as audio describers who aren’t white. So I really took a lot of solidarity from that, and I just felt like I had so many ideas, and it was really great to be able to have someone else who shared those ideas.

We joined forces, and we’ve kind of been growing since then.

TR:
Joining forces based on philosophies, yeh, I can get with that!

Elaine:
I really felt like we were just so aligned in terms of the philosophy we already had individually for our practices as audio description wanting to find like minded people. For me, it was really important to bridge that gap at that time, on a personal level, between the work that I was doing but also the audience that I was doing that work for.

At the time, I was working in TV, and I just really felt like to grow as an audio describer, I needed to be in contact with more blind folk, but also to grow as a art form, as a practice.

I just felt like that was the kind of missing key for me.

TR in conversation with SoundScribe:
What was it that made you feel as though it was important to be in contact with the community. So being in community, why was that important?

Elaine:
I guess I felt like the guidelines that I was given and that I kind of trained under, which are perfectly fine, but I just really felt like they had been shaped by sighted people, and that at some point it felt like maybe, maybe those voices had been lost and that voice just hadn’t Been really updated.

So I found that I was having conversations like when I was first on your podcast, we were just talking about describing race, for example, and just this idea that, like for blind users, that there’d be, like a default conception of who we’re describing, and that default is white. And I really felt like if we just had some voices who were Blind and people of color, then we would just cut through this need to have these endless conversations. I just really felt like, if these people were just in the room, then things would move so much faster.

With any craft, it just makes sense to include the end users as part of the production of the art.
I just think it utterly enriches it.
I think it cuts through any kind of biases that I will definitely have as like a sighted person. It broadens the kind of perspective of the audio description as well, like working. With you. Leicester is such a joy, because, literally, every single project I learned something new.

Leicester’s just pulled a really, a really sweet pose just highlight how angelic they are.

Lesta:
As a person that is both POC and disabled, I felt quite heard to be involved in the company as well, because existing as an intersectional person you’re effectively like an other of an other, and usually you’re sort of forgotten in many different kind of groups, because you’re kind of categorized as not quite that person in multiple ways. So usually your voice is forgotten.

So this was quite interesting, because my role and a bunch of other blind people was to just complain about stuff, and because I complained about stuff in a very ethnic way as well then I think they probably just picked up on it as well. So they’re kind of bitching in the cafe. Is the sort of the same mentality I have. So, yeah, it was just really wonderful to be heard. So thank you.

TR in conversation with SoundScribe:
I want to keep my facts straight. That wasn’t a cafe, that was a pub!

Lesta:
pub, yes,

Elaine:
exactly.

TR:
Y’all picking up on this idea of bitching or complaining?

It’s identifying the problems. As Lesta noted, it’s centering your full experience as a consumer.
Two different consumers with varying backgrounds will more than likely have two separate experiences, that’s cool! What’s not cool is deciding that one is the standard.

So my urging to the community… complain away!

First we complain, then we make change.

— Sound of two glasses clinking in a bar as in a toast!

TR in conversation with SoundScribe:
Okay, so let’s move into your philosophy, your approach to audio description.

Elaine:
I was just thinking about some of the words that might really motivate us.
One of them is
generative.

So the idea that audio description can actually generate art.

For example, audio description led movement workshops. Sometimes they’re like, warm ups or warm downs, and often in those workshops, choreography is created with the cast, with the choreographer, with the rehearsal director, and then sometimes that choreography even makes it into the show itself, which is the most exciting outcome of those kinds of workshops.

So really seeing audio description as a catalyst for performance making.

TR:
Elaine, Lesta and Shiv make up the core of SoundScribe, but part of their philosophy is to work with all sorts of folks from the Blind community.

Elaine:
Providing consultancy, training, providing sustainable jobs as well.
for example, sound engineers.

We work with a full range of different people, but wanting that to be focused as like blind led a big thing for us is anti objectivity, and by that, like we don’t ever want to kind of patronize anybody. We’re not making audio description that tells people how to think, but we do want to be proud and open about our subjectivity in our work.

That’s what feels really exciting about this.
Collaboration and creating something that is global majority led, and anti ableist as well.

Elaine:
So as Shiv mentioned, de centering sight as the primary way of accessing art.

Just trying to think about different ways of accessing art.

TR:
That can mean getting the artists, the content makers to think about the Blind audience, before the content is made.

Elaine:
When we come in from the beginning as audio describers, from the beginning of whatever the project is, it might be like a film that hasn’t been filmed yet. It might be a painting that hasn’t been painted, or a dance show.

We can help to shape a piece of art that is from the beginning thinking about blind and visually impaired people.

The exciting element for me working now within SoundScribe, is getting to work on shows that I actually want to go and see not working at the end, where we have a fixed product and we have to mold or do description to fit in, because then basically 10 times out of 10 that project has not been created with blind people in mind.

coming in from the beginning, I think is a really big part of our ethos, and sort of really privileged actually, to have found enough artists that also want to work in that way.

Shivaangee:
In contrast to a lot of audio describers currently out there, I think we also want to kind of treat audio description as a practice rather than just a service. So by practice we mean that it’s like a live and evolving thing where Elaine I and Lesta are well, and especially Elaine and I are kind of constantly re evaluating, like, well, what are the goals of this? What are the principles underpinning this? What are we trying to get to? What’s our ideal vision? So there’s a sense of it being a dynamic thing that is not just a fixed service, but we evolve as audio describers, and we evolve the way we do things, but also in terms of practice. It’s like a holistic thing. It informs our principles of;
how we work.
how we are with each other
how we work with the artist
what kind of things we’re advocating for beyond just having audio description,

And that feels maybe quite important to our philosophy as a collective.

TR:
Think of SoundScribe as providing tailored, custom AD. They measure each individual project separately and design the AD experience based on the objectives of the content.

It feels like it really serves the art. Enabling the SoundScribe team to grow as artists themselves.

Shivaangee:
We have so many conversations with new clients, where by just speaking to a potential new client about their work and what they’re creating that we get excited about. Oh my gosh, we could actually offer a completely different kind of audio description for this work.

That’s another reason why Elaine and I work so well, as we get really excited about the possibilities of things we have not actually tried yet and have not experienced in terms of audio description.

(Shivaangee:
We did a project where we trialed for the first time having audio descriptions that’s actually takes a format of a dialog between Elaine and myself, rather than a one person scripted thing. So the thing that people were listening to was a. Conversation between Elaine and I as we were in the audience watching the show.

We’re developing a methodology for improvised audio description, because actually, we’re finding that improvised audio description works a lot better for dance shows that are more improvised than set choreography.

So I guess it’s also being really curious and open and excited about pushing ourselves in terms of what we can offer, and not letting ourselves kind of fall short of the possibilities that might exist.

Lesta:
It’s performative, it’s an art form, and it’s responsive to the art form that you’re trying to describe. So if the dance performance was improvised, then the way you describe it has to be improvised, because you have no idea what they’re going to move like. So that’s a skill in itself.

Shivaangee”
And requires a different kind of preparation and a different kind of contact with the creative team.

TR:
You might be wondering if this customized approach, where SoundScribe is wearing their subjectivity on their sleeve affects their clientele.

Elaine:
Shiv is smiling!

Shivaangee:
I’m ready for this response. Elaine,

Elaine:
We are very intentional about who we work with and what kinds of projects we want to work with. And we’re very aware, alert to language, for example, if we’re going to work with this client, then they are anti ableist and they are anti racist, and they really, truly understand what those two words mean and why it matters to us in the world of accessibility.

I feel quite lucky that we’ve found so many artists that we do want to work with in this way, and that a lot of the work that we’re doing is quite experimental audio description.

We’re not really doing much traditional theater shows. A lot of it really is, like quite Avant Garde in terms of our clients. So that feels really great.

Shivaangee:
There’s so much to say about the intersection of race and disability. I’m just like, where do we begin?

Thomas, I was listening to some of your podcasts, and I think you speak really eloquently about being black and blind. It’s really refreshing to hear someone speaking about that intersection, because I guess we want to work with people who understand what anti racism is and how like intersectionality, like manifests in disability.

You can still bring whiteness with you if you’re disabled, you can be making an accessible piece of work that’s actually not that culturally accessible to people of color.

I guess I feel inspired by giving artists of color the opportunity to create really accessible work that is accessible for disabled people.

I guess I have qualms about disability justice also being led often by white people. So it’s really inspiring and satisfying when we can work to bring high quality, accessible work to artists of color.

TR in conversation with SoundScribe:
Have you ever been in a situation where you’re approached by someone and they don’t meet your requirements. Are you? Like, we can’t work with you.

Shivaangee:
that happens quite frequently, and quite unsurprisingly, we get a sense of that very quickly.

We’ll get a sense of, this is not going to work out. It’s thankfully, often quite obvious.

Sometimes we have a sense of like we could work with this client. Not everybody’s going to be in the same place when it comes to justice and understanding your practice of justice.
And often we have a conversation around we could work with this client, it will probably be a bit challenging for us in these ways, and we might have to do some reiterating of these principles and education. But then Elaine and I turn to each other and we’re like, do we have the capacity for that right now? Or, like, does the remuneration of this project allow for that kind of work to be done? And if not, then fuck it that’s they can choose someone else.

Lesta:
from my perspective, sometimes it’s quite a good thing to actually partake in these sorts of things. I’m quite hardened, so my viewpoint is like, one way to deal with this sort of thing is to explode it from the inside, you know, once you’re in, just start having a go, see what happens. You know, because then they’re not used to it.

They obviously want to listen or have the good intention to it’s just that they’re not at that right place quite yet.

— Clock ticking

TR:
I’m telling y’all… times up!

TR in conversation with SoundScribe:
So you raised two projects, and I want to talk about that.
I’m very interested in the dialog AD. Can we start there?

Elaine:
so that’s a show that we’re actually going to do again, and I’m really, really excited, because hopefully we can come back with, like, basically, bigger, better tech.

It’s a really good example of an artist and producer who just got the vision from the beginning. They were like, such, yes, people anything that we needed, and that was the first time that we’d worked with Lesta as well.

It’s called Impact Driver. The artist is called Eve Stanton. And that was a show that featured live welding with a huge, massive welding container. It’s really awesome. I think five to six performers very, very improvised. Lots of solo work, duet work, writhing with metal to live musicians on opposite ends of the venue, playing guitar. So it was quite a loud experience, and because of where the container was, it meant that me and Shiv basically needed to be on opposite ends, especially because the performers were roaming, and you’d never know actually which path they take.

TR:
Ah, the idea of improvised AD makes even more sense in these circumstances.

Elaine:
It was also a really good example of leading ad workshop. It meant that the entire cast, then totally got it. They were like, Oh, this is what audio description is. They also started to think about their own choreography from a linguistic sense as well.

How can we name the things that we’re doing, which is really helpful for us, because that’s its own kind of audio description.

I would describe what I could see say in the front half of the stage, including in the welding container. And then Shiv was behind that, also describing. If a performer roamed beyond my sight line, then basically, Shiv would take over.

Performing it live, was really exhilarating.

Terrifying before the show starts, and then this calm just kind of descend, and you just go for it.

It felt really, dare I say punk. because the whole show felt really punked as well. So it was a kind of like loud, messy audio description.

Leicester came in at a super, super messy, moment, because we hadn’t actually tested hours at that point. And, yeah, it was really great.

I think we had maybe four or five visually impaired people who came along to that trial run and gave us some really, really invaluable feedback before the actual show.

Shivaangee:
Most of it was in darkness as well and four different speakers around the room. So it was very intense environment, even as a sighted audience member.

TR:
Sounds like another one of those situations where the AD could serve a broader audience.

TR in conversation with SoundScribe:
How are you all thinking about possibly using the back and forth aspect of it?
Are you thinking about ways where you can bring that into something else?

Shivaangee:
So we’re in conversations with a new client that we’ve not worked with before, and the work that they’re creating is all about visibility and invisibility of queerness, and it uses kind of a mirror and like a gray board as two key props in the work, where they use illusion and disappearing as A metaphor for their exploration.

There’s like the middle of the audience where you’ll get the Perfect Illusion. And then if you’re sitting anywhere, that’s not the middle of the audience, you will not benefit from that Perfect Illusion. So now they’re thinking, as they’re getting into staging, well how do we navigate this fact that 80% of the audience is not going to get our Perfect Illusion?

So in our conversation with them about audio description, we all came up with the idea of Elaine and I roaming the sets and kind of audio describing to each other, what we can see and what we can’t see as a way of really leaning into this thing of you’re not going to get a perfect view of what’s happening, and each person is going to get a slightly different view of the illusion.

They got really excited about how it can actually support their work and support this whole illusion that they’re trying to problem solve.

Lesta:
I think it’s like, the more different projects that basically you’re involved in, essentially, you can test out different ways of doing stuff. And if the clients are open, then you can just try it. It’s very experimental and very trial based. It’s quite exciting in that respect, because it’s the development of audio description as a entity that can be informed into sort of the general consensus as well.

Shivaangee:
We’re talking about the really optimistic experiences we’ve had where people, as Elaine said, have been like, yes, producers and yes, artists who have been like, we love this. We love the experimental, creative potential, body description. Let’s go all out. But I feel like that’s definitely not status quo in the industry and a lot of people just simply don’t have the budget.
They don’t have the capacity, time wise, in their creation schedule to give us that much play time.

So I’d say just to balance out, we do bump into a lot of no’s as well that like that sounds great for the future, but for this time round, we have this many days and this much money and this to work with.

It feels important to also name that these are optimistic scenarios where we find these wonderful artists,

TR:
Reality checks are necessary.

But these artistic, experimental projects will inevitably make their way into the mainstream.
Not all at once or as radical, but rather small aspects of them will show up here and there.

Access doesn’t have to be solely functional.
It can go beyond the access and do more.

Lesta:
When me and Shiv did many lifetimes, she sat next to me, and we were testing her audio description, and I was sort of saying, Oh, but like, and it was improvised as well. So she did a really great job in general. But like, they were like, seven dancers, and they all had really different characters and the way they moved, because I can still use some of my site, and I can still understand the blobs in front of me, sort of So I was like, this person kind of looks like a martial artist. He’s, like, really dynamic. This guy’s like, all over the place, like roaming around outside of this, the room and everything. And this one is kind of like really intimate, because it was all about grief, the whole the whole piece. And I said, you know, maybe the way you describe it, in your language and in how you deliver it can be different, depending on the solo, because it’s describing their intention of demonstrating grief of death in a very, very personal way. That was an example of, you know, like how the how audio description can be an art form itself, like that.

Shivaangee:
I remember you saying you wouldn’t have necessarily have come to watch the show if we hadn’t brought you as a consultant.

That makes Leicester’s work even more impressive.
In that show there wasn’t any explicit sense that each person was a character. It was a very personal, autobiographical kind of context each of these solos. So there’s actually Lesta picking up, as we were kind of speaking to each of the artists, and Lesta was there. Lesta picked up. And actually, don’t you think they all have quite different personalities, and they have different ways of manifesting in the space. Maybe we can start to assign certain characteristics in the way that you’re even describing them and the tone of voice you’re using, which was really insightful given that this is not the kind of work necessarily that you would choose to see or like choose to enjoy.

Lesta:
Otherwise, no, no. I mean, you know, also there was some sort of difficulties in the space as well. So, I was able to suggest things like, just generally in the actual building itself, because of my architectural background, but also in the space itself.

I think it helped anybody that else would like to come see it actually. You know, in terms of watching Dance, I used to love watching dance performances all the time after my site is progressive, basically, but I watch, I don’t really like watching things now, just because it’s, it’s, it’s not that accessible. And dance specifically is not very accessible, but it is becoming more so because of different. Methodologies. And so it’s actually getting more joyful to be able to go see these things. I think a lot of vision impaired people feel like that, like, you know, dance is just not an art form they can enter into or have a look at. But because it’s being done in this sort of experimental way, I think that’s very appropriate and like quite useful.

TR in conversation with SoundScribe:
great to hear. That’s great, especially coming from you Lesta, because you keep saying you’re grumpy.

I’m saying you’re not grumpy.

Shivaangee:
Though, I love that we using grumpy as like a euphemism.

Lesta:
It’s a very British word.

— Transition

TR:
I’m excited for SoundScribe. They recognize what’s really important to them. Like , community!

Elaine:
I don’t think we’re looking to explode in numbers at all. I really like the kind of intimacy of our collaboration.
There are many people who we collaborate with that people won’t necessarily know about.
There are so many sound engineers that we work with, ESL interpreters, other consultants. It’s such a beautiful network.

TR:
The importance of going beyond the work and supporting one another.

Elaine:
Lesta’s taking us out jazz dancing, which I’m very excited about.

Shivaangee:
Lesta is an incredible jazz dancer, yeah, so we can’t wait to, like, experience Leicester in that capacity as well.

Lesta
Oh I hyped up too much.

TR in conversation with SoundScribe:
I have a feeling Lesta is going to show and prove.

TR:
The value in dreaming.

Elaine:
My dream would be to bring on another narrator, maybe, or scripter who is blind?

TR:
The importance of equity.

Elaine:
I think there needs To be an industry shift.
For example, with theaters, they tend to work with the same people.
The way that I personally moved into that sector was through recommendations from other people who were working in those theaters basically and couldn’t do a job, and then passed it on.

It is definitely quite cliquey in the UK. I don’t think that venues will really take a risk on a new person unless they come with a recommendation, and those recommendations are from mostly white, middle class women.
I think there’s a bit of gatekeeping in the industry, even when people are trained, even when you have a whole cohort, there could be like 20 of us that are all trained and ready to go, then the door is kind of already shut.

I feel like no one really wants to kind of admit that, because then you have to give up work. It’s a hard economy, people are scared.
They don’t want to do that.

TR:
It doesn’t have to be just a dream.

(Elaine:
I would love for us to just get a bunch of funding and train some people. And also join forces with a venue so that we are guaranteed we are the in house audio describers, and now we’re going to bring in seven different people who are all going to get to have a go at what you’re describing, that to me would be like, Yeah, that’ll be a future goal.

We’ve got many plans, Thomas, we’ve got plans!

Shivaangee:
I think the discourse is also important. I don’t know what it’s like in the US, but in the UK, there’s just so much tiptoeing around race. People will not talk about it unless you bring it up.
It’s really important just to keep naming that, just to keep bringing white people’s attention to race.

Are you employing anybody else in your creative team that’s not white?
Often we are the only people on the wide creative team that are global majority.
and sadly, it’s kind of important to keep naming it for people so that they are aware of the subjectivities they’re bringing into the work and who they’re giving opportunities too.

TR:
And finally, recognizing the importance of gratitude.

Elaine:
I feel really, really lucky to be in this space.

TR:
I couldn’t let the conversation end without asking Lesta, about her thoughts on some current AD topics.

I really liked her perspective on how TTS further reduces that human connection and how important that is especially after vision loss.

Lesta:
When you start to lose your sight, you start to lose not just your sight, but the sociability associated with it, the connection to other humans, looking at each other, knowing where everyone knows and everything, and not being able to maybe go out as much or do stuff as you wanted to you used to, especially those who weren’t born blind. So the connection to a human is really desirable. And you know, going to shows and having a sort of live audio description or like someone speaking, you start to get that kind of connection. Because when you actually go to a show as a sighted person, you go to a show live because you want to be connected to, say, the dancer or the art, the actor in front of you. Otherwise you just watch it on TV.

TR:
Even the technology of closed audio description can affect that connection for Lesta.

Lesta:
When I wear a headset, it just cuts out my ability to understand the background noise and the footsteps of the dances, the sound of wind as they move past. These are the things that you lose that are like humanistic so I tend to veer away from technology.
in terms of audio description, I prefer to be present in the space.

TR:
And, on the subject of authentic representation in AD narration?

Lesta:
Well, that is an interesting topic, isn’t it?

If you go back again to the fact that it’s a performance, I would say that it’s a reflection of the art form. So it has to be appropriate and relevant, it’s performative. It’s not just like a service at the end where you’re just saying a load of stuff that’s describing the whole art piece.

TR:
While she is all in for cultural appropriate casting, she identifies the related problem faced by narrators of color in audio description.

Lesta:
And actually, every profession under the sun, not just audio description.

A person of color, is quite often put in a box, pigeonholing in the UK, so you only do these types of jobs. I feel like that with race, but I also feel like that with my visual impairment. Like, it’s intersectional as well, right?

A person of color or a person who is disabled can work in these specific type of fields, where it’s culturally competent and appropriate, but also can work in other aspects of everything. So Elaine can go and do her Marvel show. That’s totally cool like if she wanted to, because the thing is, is that it’s about like ability as well. These two women are great audio describers. It’s not like there’s nothing to do with their ethnicity or the way they look, it’s just their skill level. So they should be appreciated for that.

TR:
Well, I can tell you I appreciate Elaine, Lesta and Shivaangee… SoundScribe!

If you’re in the UK and want to work with SoundScribe or just let them know you think they’re dope, head on over to there website

SoundScribe.co.Uk.

TR in Conversation with SoundScribe:
Well, Elaine, you already know Lesta Shiv after every episode, for those who come onto the podcast and they share their information, they share their time and share with the family, I gotta let y’all know that you’re now an official part of the Reid My Mind Radio Family!

Shivaangee:
Thank you so much for inviting us into this conversation. It was a privilege.

TR:
I really enjoyed that conversation.

I have a feeling we’ll be hearing more from SoundScribe in the future. They’re doing cool stuff and our philosophies are aligned.

Anti racist, anti ableist… anti hate!

You can’t say you want the world to be those things without being intentional. So what are you doing in your space?

Let me know!

Hit me up at ReidMyMindRadio@gmail.com.

I hope you all will continue rocking with Reid My Mind Radio and subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.

You know, we have transcripts and more over at ReidMyMind.com.

Only one way to get there…
I’m mean, you can take a car and put your luggage in the boot, take the tube, or ride the lift to the top floor,
but you’ll still need to spell it right….

that’s R to the E I D!

— Sample: “D! And that’s me in the place to be”, Slick Rick

Like my last name
— Reid My Mind Outro

Peace!

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