by Elena Loi

As I continue working underneath Celia Hughes at Art Spark TX, I’m learning more about the best practices for audio description and hope to incorporate color theory and common color associations into the training that I am creating for museums. While starting this project, I was tasked with going through the training modules that were created to train audio describers and it stood out to me that the first module was primarily addressing what exactly blindness was. It had gone completely over my head about including this in the training that I’m creating and it also made me question what I knew myself.

Alt Text: Elena holding the Audio Description hardware as she sets-up for the show at Ground Floor Theatre.

I recently created a form that would collect people’s associations with colors in order to help with my desire to incorporate color theory into my audio description training and one of the first questions is for the person to describe the blindness. Although I knew about several different types of blindness and was aware that blindness was a spectrum, the various answers that I received still surprised me and it showed how little I knew about blindness. Despite growing up with possible retinal detachment, having my sister experience corneal degenerations, and having a cousin who had cataracts at a young age, there were still terms and definitions that I didn’t know about. One of the videos that Celia had me go through in my training modules was “Blindness is a Spectrum”, a YouTube video that had different blind YouTubers explain their vision loss. Terms like Retinitis Pigmentosa, Stargardt’s Disease, and Hermansky-Pudlak Syndrome Type 3 were all said within the first minute of the video and it showed me that there are still aspects to blindness that I should be aware of and learn more about because it really helped me frame the idea of blindness being a spectrum better.

Alt Text: Elena assists Adam as he tries out the audio description hardware.

With this in mind, a part of me wanted to focus more of the training on explaining what blindness was and to limit the time spent on colors and other artistic elements that museum docents would likely already be using in their work. However, Celia brought up the necessity of activating knowledge. While I might already be connecting the importance of explaining things like colors, lines, and shapes in audio description, the museum docents that my training is meant to teach may not realize that there is a strong connection between the explanation of those elements and their work as audio describers for blind visitors, so I definitely need to learn how to balance those two aspects as I create my training.

As I continue with my work, I want to integrate all of these things into my training while also playing up the strengths of the museum docents that the training is targeted towards. A hard truth that I had to confront was that I had no love or passion for abstract art, which went against Celia’s teachings of how you needed to love the art so that you can describe it as best as you can. I want to learn more about how museum docents talk about various types of art and there is so much that I can learn from the people around me as I create this training.

Alt Text: Elena and Celia pose for a selfie outside of the Ground Floor Theatre display.