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From seeing to hearing: Lessons learned from a research-based design project focused upon audio description, print-to-acoustic remediation, and mobile-app delivery

This paper describes the process we undertook to address a significant technical communication issue embedded within traditional information-distribution procedures in the U.S. National Park Service: The bureau's nationally circulated brochures, as print artifacts, are inaccessible to people who are blind, visually impaired and print dyslexic and also not optimized for people who prefer audio communication. This report includes findings from the second year of a three-year project, funded by a grant from the National Park Service. Our first year on this project was spent getting to know the frameworks and foundations of the 342 brochures currently circulating in the country, through a deep reading of samples and a larger content analysis of the brochure structures and content genres. The second year of this project, which is the focus of this paper and poster presentation at SIGDOC 2016, revolves around the design-based research prototyping experiments we conducted as a way to create and refine a web tool to support and produce audio description, particularly in relation to the remediation of NPS brochures to audio-based mobile apps. This process led to prototyping experiments within the NPS that revealed a significant gap between practitioner knowledge and best practices. Those best practices also were found to be lacking in many areas, such as guidance for the practitioners to audio describe a NPS staple, the site map. While audio description, like open/closed captioning, might be considered a relatively straightforward process to those uninitiated in the activity, these practitioner experiments revealed many of the nuances and complexities of audio description that make it a difficult translation exercise. They also led to the generation of important scholarly research questions, such as "In what ways could one audio describe a map?"