Audio description of gender: self-description as an evocation of identity

ABSTRACT

Gender gets socially constructed in many visual ways, but people who are blind or who have low-vision want to know the gender of those around them, too, as well as other salient positionality details. Like with age, race, fashion, etc., a person’s appearance can provide a lot of information about them and their character. Audio description, as a form of audiovisual translation, is a way to make that appearance accessible to those who cannot see it. Yet empirical research about audio description of gender – a complicated and highly contested arena of public discourse – is underdeveloped. This study addresses that issue through a Grounded Theory approach, constructivist in nature, that both generated self-descriptions of portrait images and piloted a model way to analyze them. This process prompted 179 new self-descriptions written during three hackathon-like events over multiple years, illuminating compositional gender-construction strategies as well as fertile paths for audio description research.

KEYWORDS:

• Audio description
• gender
• portrait
• self-description
• blind
• low-vision

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities [grant number 276851-21]; and the U.S. National Park Service [grant number P20AC01084-01].

Notes on contributors

Brett Oppegaard

Brett Oppegaard, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. His interdisciplinary research of digital media products and processes takes place at intersections of Technical Communication, Rhetoric, Disability Studies, Digital Inequalities, and Journalism, primarily through a design-based-research approach involving mobile media and mobile technologies. His research has been supported by the U.S. National Park Service, the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts, and Google.

Andreas Miguel

Andreas Miguel, M.A., is a recent graduate of the School of Communications at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. He earned his master's degree in Communication, with a specialty in content analysis.