durham audio described art

The DADA project (Durham Audio Described Art) is a collaborative effort of Duke University, the City of Durham's Cultural Advisory Board, Durham Arts Place, and Arts Access, Inc. within Duke University. The project provides audio descriptions of public art and architecture to make those works accessible to people who are blind. Audio description enables a person who is blind to share the artistic experience with those without visual disabilities, and with around 10 million Americans who are blind or have very low vision, this is a massive step forward in the sphere of accessibility within the United States.

Former District Judge Craig Brown has been blind since childhood. In 2016, he joined along with Dan Ellison (art’s attorney and service-learning professor at Duke University) and his class of Duke undergraduate students as they practiced audio-describing artwork at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Judge Brown commented that day that he hadn't been to an art museum for all those 20 years because he felt it had nothing for him to experience. Now, he is enthusiastic about how audio description of artwork will provide for him and other people who are blind in the future.

our work

Here are two projects a classmate and I worked on throughout the Spring of 2019. You can press the images to visit the DADA site and listen to our audio descriptions. We created the following by visiting the respective works, attempting to describe them to one another as the other didn’t look at the piece, and saw which words and phrases stuck best. We read our drafts to a low-vision/blind audience in order to receive feedback and create our final descriptions.