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Joel Snyder, Audio Describer

The fab five on Queer Eye were talking so fast, it forced me to turn on captioning, which turned out to be serendipitous. There, I discovered the option “English – Audio Description” and marveled at the linguistic gymnastics it required for the audio describer (AD) to squeeze in a coherent narrative of what the show was depicting visually — all in the rare quiet spaces not otherwise filled by perky music cues or Jonathan Van Ness’s ice skating metaphors.

Audio describers are tasked with using language to convey to visually impaired viewers what’s being portrayed on a stage or screen. It is unquestionably an art form, a feat of poetic efficiency. It’s also a relatively new field, debuting first on radio and then on public television in the 1980s. It wasn’t until the 1990s and 2000s that AD found its way into major theaters, television, and now, streaming.

Joel Snyder has been along for the entire ride. He helped pioneer the discipline, first with live theater at the Metropolitan Washington Ear and then into television and film by starting a description program for the National Captioning Institute. Since that time, his company Audio Description Associates, has been contracted by the American Council for the Blind to run the Audio Description Project, a large-scale initiative to promote the field. He also literally wrote the book on AD. His manual, The Visual Made Verbal, is a training manual for AD students worldwide.

In the interview below (edited for brevity and clarity), we discuss how audio description is one of the few booming fields for people with poetic sensibilities. (more…)