While I’m busy with other description work, here’s a preview of the next movie, where March Madness is a little less mad, but a college basketball player could still commit a bad personal foul.
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Associated links
The project I’m working on!
The folks for whom I’m doing it!
While MFTB140 was supposed to be uploaded today, the computer in which it was being finished has crashed badly, and so far, efforts to revive it have not worked. It may be best to delay the episode until next week. Sorry. So hang in there, and I’ll update you as soon as I can get production going again. Thanks!
Sorry to have teased you with the teaser for MFTB139, because it won’t be coming until September 5th.
More than a few podcasts take long breaks in the summer to start out fresh in the fall – I tend to think it’s a habit developed by tv seasons past in North America – but I never thought it was necessary. But as more description and voiceover work has landed at my desk with a happy thud, I’ve decided the time is now.
Some pretty great stuff is taking me away from MFTB for a few weeks. On the description side, there’s a powerful documentary for the CBC and ten films of varying lengths and subjects from the terrific folks at the DCMP. It also looks like another tv series is on the horizon, after I finished a pretty interesting cooking show. In addition, I’ve been working on an ongoing basis with a great company in South Korea providing voiceover for teaching materials for an English as a Second Language program. Add it all up, and it’s a pretty crazy August.
MFTB will not be at a total standstill, though. I’ll continue making video clips of past movies and posting them to the MFTB Facebook page (which may hopefully lead to more video elsewhere, but I won’t get ahead of myself). I’ll also be there posting the odd piece of news from the world of audio description. The same will likely happen on something that’s been going on for a while but has seldom been mentioned here: the MFTB Twitter account, @movies4theblind. And there are always past episodes you may have missed, all waiting for you here and on Internet Archive. Speaking of IA, if you run across a film we haven’t had, which is in the public domain (it will usually have a Creative Commons designation saying so), and you’d like it described, link it in the comments here, on the wall of the FB page or to @movies4theblind on Twitter. I’ll see what I can do.
If you’d like to learn more about the technique used to create MFTB, audio description, there’s a very good review available now of a great event I was not able to attend last month, the 2010 Audio Description Project Conference presented by the American Council of the Blind. The page gives a great rundown of what was discussed: from description techniques to legislation for more available description to how far description has progressed (or not progressed) in countries all over the world. There’s even audio of some of the presentations and Power Point for those so inclined. For a brief but big picture of audio description today, it’s well worth checking out.
Thanks, everybody, for your understanding and your amazing support. Enjoy the rest of your summer (or for the Aussies, winter), and meet you back here in September!
While I finish doing some other description work, we look ahead to next week and a listener request that’s not the end of the world…or is it?
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Click here to download directly from Blind File Sharing
Associated links
Described and Captioned Media Program
While I take a week off, we look forward to the next movie, starring an old MFTB favourite in the role of his career.
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Info on why there’s no episode this week, some tech trouble and a full preview of the next episode. Thanks for your patience!
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Click here to download directly from Blind File Sharing
Associated links
Podcasters Across Borders
Links related to my PAB2009 presentation:
Audio Description International
“Description Key” for Educational Media from the Described and Captioned Media Program
DVS: Media Access Group of WGBH
AudioVision Canada
LiveDescribe from the Centre for Learning Technology at Ryerson
CapScribe from the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre at the University of Toronto
Description: Valerie In Toronto
Caribbean Free Radio
(Update at end of post.)
You know that I don’t usually post something not directly related to what I do here, but there’s a matter that has come up which could be a concern to listeners who are blind, have vision impairments or other kinds of restrictions from reading print.
If you are one of those listeners, it’s possible you have been able to get accessible versions of text (books, magazines, etc.) because of certain copyright exemptions within your country. Not everyone in the world has access to those materials, because their respective countries may not produce them. Earlier this week at the 18th Session of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (WIPO being the United Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organization), the governments of Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay introduced a proposal for a treaty which would allow those materials to be more easily imported and exported, so more people around the world can have access to them. More information on this treaty can be found here.
Okay, this sounds great. But in the negotiations about the treaty going on as I write this, government representatives of many of the richer countries – including the U.S., Canada, Australia and countries of the European Union – are fighting to have this treaty killed, on the basis of protecting copyright owners. This is a similar rationale to the Writers Guild in the U.S. lobbying to disable the speech-to-text feature in the new Kindle (more information on that here), but taken to a more basic and global level.
Activists at this WIPO meeting are doing their best to inform as many people as possible about what’s going on here, acknowledging the dangerous precedent it sets for rights to print accessibility. The matter was initially brought to my attention by Cory Doctorow, writing this post this morning on BoingBoing, which referred to this post by one of the activists on site. If these issues are of concern to you, you may want to read this information and pass it along to anyone you think may also be interested.
Again, I’m sorry to take this blog out of the usual realm into something more like advocacy, but this seemed like an especially important matter to many members of the audience, and the call for more restriction has gained a momentum that I feel needs to be met with louder calls from those affected.
Thanks for getting through this. Back to the show… :-)
Update: The WIPO has made a decision to carry over discussion of the treaty to the next session of the Committee, with time and place yet to be determined. This means the treaty has not been killed, but has not yet been approved either. The official conclusions have been posted here. This gives anyone concerned with these issues time to build support for the next round – and to take a hard look at the governments that were fighting to have the treaty killed. Thanks again.
By popular demand, there are more videos available in the “Video Available” category, for friends and family of varying vision abilities to watch together or for people with sight to learn more about how description is done.
(If you’re on a screen reader, get ready for lots of links…)
The Andy Griffith Show’s “High Noon In Mayberry” (featured in Episode 61) now has its own described video version, available at Internet Archive, YouTube (as a three-part playlist), Myspace and Blip.tv. Episode 37’s Dick Van Dyke Show, “A Man’s Teeth Are Not His Own,” has also been added to Myspace, as has our first Dick Van Dyke video, “Give Me Your Walls” (from Episode 36), which you can find at Myspace here.
If your favourite video site hasn’t been listed here, it’s still possible you can find Movies For the Blind videos there. I’ve uploaded to various places, so go to the site of your choice and search with those show titles – you just might find something. Wherever you watch/listen to the videos, please feel free to share!
(updated with a new .mp3 link March 27)
Wednesday night, I was honoured to be a guest on “Sound Prints,” a great radio show by the Kentucky Council of the Blind which airs weekly on WKJK AM 1080 in Louisville, Kentucky. It was fun to talk with hosts Michael McCarty and Carla Ruschival about the podcast and about description, and now everyone can hear it online – download the show as an mp3.
You can always hear the latest episode of Sound Prints as a stream here, or listen via the American Council for the Blind’s ACB Radio Mainstream – where Sound Prints airs every other hour from Sunday 9pm to Monday 7pm eastern.
Thanks so much to Michael and Carla for having me on the show, and to Bernard at Blind File Sharing for suggesting it.
If you download .mp3s of this podcast, as of the next episode, you’ll find them coming from a new place: Blind File Sharing.
It’s a file storage and delivery service designed with blind and vision-impaired users in mind. That means no graphics, no capchas (those annoying image-based things you have to navigate to prove you’re not a bot), no Flash-y doodads – just simple, accessible, inexpensive ways to upload, store and share your files.
Find out for yourself what their downloading speed is like when you get your MFTB episodes from them. If you’re impressed and curious about the service, visit blindfilesharing.com to learn more.
Full disclosure: a portion of this new relationship involves paid advertising. If you have any questions or concerns about this, please let me know – I’m being very careful and conservative with my first foray into this sort of thing, but think it makes sense, since both MFTB and BFS believe in internet accessibility for everyone. The real test for BFS’ service is in how you use it, so we hope it helps you. Tell us about your experience!
Thanks, everyone, for your support. On with the show… :-)
Movies For the Blind is featured on the latest episode of Podcast Junky™, the great podcast about podcasts. Lovely things were said, big clips were played from episodes 26 and 28, and a very cool Jonathan Coulton song about zombies was played in honour of Vincent Price in The Last Man on Earth. So hello to everyone coming from there, and if you didn’t come from there and would like to learn about some terrific podcasts, go to Podcast Junky and listen!
I received a lovely email this morning from Thomas of the blog Reid My Mind saying he’s written a post about MFTB there, as well as on the blog for the Monroe County Council of the Blind in Pennsylvania.
In the Reid My Mind post, he talks about a good friend who did “live description” for him over the phone as they watched the last season of the HBO series “The Wire”, and how terrific it was. For people who aren’t vision-impaired, it was hard enough keeping track of everyone on that show – can you imagine not being able to see them? It makes you wonder why description couldn’t be available through the TV or on the popular DVDs for that show, so Thomas didn’t have to rely on a friend to tell him what was going on. Check the sidebar links to go to other sites with more information on description and places where you can get it on TV.
Thanks very much to Thomas, and hello to the great people he’s sent this way!
Hello to anyone who may be coming to the show from hearing the promo on episode 750 of the Daily Source Code. More than three years ago, Adam Curry said something on the DSC about how great audio podcasting (especially soundseeing tours) could be for people who are vision-impaired, which inspired me to think about my job in terms of podcasting, and finally here we are sharing what are essentially soundseeing tours of movies. So big thanks to Adam for the support, and welcome “Chuckleheads”. :-)
Hi, guys. In the wacky world of podcasting, people sometimes make short promos that tell folks about their shows and why they should check them out. These promos get downloaded, shared and even played on the shows of other nice podcasters. At least that’s what I’ve heard, since I’ve never produced a promo before…because they’re hard. :-)
But I have finally gotten the elbow grease going and produced a promo for Movies For the Blind. So if you’re interested in spreading the word about the show by sending this to friends, posting it to your favourite social networking places, or even playing it on your podcast if you have one, check it out and feel free to pass it around with my deepest thanks.
Click here to listen to the Movies For the Blind promo!
Update: And thanks to the Podcast Promo Show for playing the promo today!
