Good morning we are here today with Dr Louise Freyer for many years presenter for BBC Radio 3, audio describer at the National Theatre and also vocalize AD trainer and Doctor of Psychology researching AD and UCL. Thank you for having us today. You're welcome. So Dr Freyer could you tell us about the earlier stages in your career? My first degree was in anthropology I had a big interest in people and then when I left college I didn't care with my studies. I was working as an actress and a colleague of mine was working at the National Theatre and they decided to to train audio describers and they thought it would be a good idea to make their performances accessible to be able to blind and partially sighted and my colleague asked me if I wanted to train too and I thought it was sound really interesting so I did and I still described there 20 or years later and then after that I worked for the BBC for a long time as a radio presenter and then I decided I would go back to college because I the thing I was most interested in from everything that I'd done in my life was the description and why it worked, why blind people liked it, whether or not the way we did it was the right way whether there were other ways perhaps we should change our approach so I thought about doing an MA and then PhD and description I discovered at that stage was part of translation studies and I'm a sadly monolingual English person and I was not so much interested in it as a form of translation although I have become so but I was interested in how blind people received the information and how they immersed themselves in a medium that's artificial and non-tangible so I decided that I would explore description through psychology so I went to Goldsmiths in the University of London and I found a supervisor who was interested in concepts of immersion and presence in particular and I thought this would be a really useful way of exploring description because you're not asking blind people to think about the description you're asking them about their experience of the theatre or the play or the film or whatever they're going to see so I did an MSC in fact in research methods in trust in psychology and then I went on and did a PhD and since then I've been teaching at UCL. Perfect you have recently published a practical guide for audio description it's entitled an introduction to audio description a practical guide and it's my RAPLITCH 2016 what is audio description? Audio description is an oral commentary that you add to a play or a film or any visual product to make it accessible to people who can't perceive the images for themselves and audio description is also related to audio introductions in some way what are those? Audio introductions happen in their theatre so in the theatre before a blind person will go to a play the describer will write a kind of ten or fifteen minute introduction describing the characters and the set and the visual style of the piece and perhaps including some background information from the printed program and then Padro Romero Fresco and I took that idea and decided it would be useful for film because often in a film there's not enough time to give all the information about the different visual aspects of the film so we decided to test it with blind people to see whether or not they found it useful, most of them did so we've written few audio introductions for film and that's how they relate it kind of creates the context for a blind or partially sighted person to then listen to the description and have a full understanding of what's going on and also related to translation what are audio subtitles? Audio subtitles you have to voice the subtitles for a blind person because obviously they can't read them for themselves so in any kind of multilingual production or foreign film for example when it might be a let's say it's a film by Amar Dava who's that's been translated with English subtitles for an English speaking audience and if you were describing that film for an English speaking blind audience you would also need to voice the subtitles so that a blind person could also have access to the dialogue and that's what audio subtitles are. In your latest monograph in an introduction to audio description you seem to be a proponent of the concept of presence bringing together psychology and audio description themselves what's presence? presence is a concept of transportation in media so rather than feeling present in your environment where you really are you feel transported under the events on stage or on screen and so it's a sense of being there and it's a kind of multi-construct idea that the concept came from the word telepresence whereby people using remote access technology such as a surgeon doing an operation using I don't know you call it but an extended sense of some type he would feel a one with his tool even though it was a long way from away from him and that's that's what the original concept of presence was but it's now generally used as another term for immersion in technology. Your research is quite interdisciplinary and you belong to a consolidated research group that is quite active it's called Transmedia Catalonia I believe what has been your relationship with the rest of the group? I've done lots of research with them because we all have a kind of common interest in making audio description better and in finding ways of testing with users the best way to describe giving people alternatives and asking them what wish they prefer and which they find most transporting in the sense given them the most engagement the most enjoyment of the audio visual production. Perfect and what about the uses themselves? What about people who have blind or partially sighted? Do they have a voice in how audio description, audio interactions and why not audio subtitling is made? They have a voice in the sense that they take part in the research which is great and certainly my research with blind people has strongly influenced how I approach audio description. So the concept of using presence very much came about from asking a blind person to comment on a theatre description that it had been to and he said he couldn't because he actually didn't notice the description because he was so involved in the play and for me that's the kind of hallmark of quality in description because you don't want to draw attention to the description people don't go to hear the description they go to see a play and be able to talk about it later with their friends to be involved engaged and laugh with everybody else or weep with everybody else depending on what kind of play it is. Then at the time of judging the quality of an audio description do you think that the voice of the audio describer should be detached or most robotic like or different from that? I think it should be very much emotionally engaged I think the way we understand each other as humans is very much not limited to the meaning of our words the semantic meaning but very much to the whole prosody the kind of tone of voice will give you a lot of information we can infer with us I'm as happy or sad and emphasis and stress allows you to comprehend much more readily so you can take a phrase such as I killed your wife and depending on where you put the stress you can completely alter the meaning of the sentence so I killed your wife I killed your wife I killed your wife as opposed to your hamster so I think we underestimate how important it is to emphasis emphasize the right part of the sentence. Well that's audio description as a discipline or as a modality fit with accessibility as a whole. It's very much part and parcel of it in that I think for a long time there's been an emphasis on making everything accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing and audio description is really the counterpart to that so it's the people with different kinds of sensory disabilities can enjoy media the same way as people who have no disability. What does the future hold for the field of accessibility and for audio describers and audio description? I hope that it holds a great deal more of personalization which has become a kind of big theme in media generally so that you can choose the size of your subtitles and the color of the font in description maybe you can choose the voice of your subscriber or quite how much detail you want or whether or not you want to have a cinematic information, better film or just the kind of straightforward what's going on. So a lot more choice I hope this what the future holds. The final question as a monolingual speaker do you think that audio description as well as the other similarities of accessibility could be an active way of learning a new language? I think they can I think there's a small amount of research to show that children, small children, small blind children, expand their vocabulary through audio description and I certainly think that if you're a non-native speaker of English and you're struggling to understand what's going on by having someone tell you when you watch the images it's much easier to pick up vocabulary. Well fantastic thank you very much. Okay you're welcome thank you.