UniDescription

Seattle MB, LLC (Montana Banana)

About this app

This app shares prototype audio description from dozens of National Park Service sites throughout the country, translating their paper brochures into acoustic media, designed for people who are blind, visually impaired, print dyslexic, or who prefer learning through sound.

Everyone deserves full access to public discourse about public resources, and this University of Hawaii at Manoa (UH) research project has been created to serve diverse audiences, under the core principles of Universal Design.

Our sponsors include: The University of Hawaii, The National Park Service, Google, The American Council of the Blind, and The Hawaii-Pacific Islands Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit.

Core contributors include: Brett Oppegaard (Principal Investigator, UH), Megan Conway (Co-Pi, UH), Thomas Conway (Co-Pi, UH), Michele Hartley (Media Accessibility Coordinator, NPS), Joe Oppegaard (CTO, Montana Banana), Philipp Jordan (RA, UH), Tuyet Hayes (RA, UH), Sajja Koirala (RA, UH), and Terence Rose (RA, UH).

For more information, visit: www.unidescription.org

To contact the PI, email: [e-mail]

Ratings and reviews

A great app that allows anyone to learn about the park's they are visiting (or just curious about)! Lots of information readily available for all levels of visual impairments. The UX works well though, as mentioned in other comments, could use some polishing to make the experience easier to navigate. But the information presented is vast and is ever expanding.

I am using this app to help offer descriptive audio to the visually impaired. So far it seem like a very useful app. In listening to the audo descriptions I'm not a keen on a mechanical voice, but more than that I feel like the computerized voice could use some improvement in machine learning on when to pause so as to give better flow to the descriptions. This isn't all the time but there are some instances where it could use improvement.

As a player in Descriptathon 8 using text to speech software I find this app smooth to use informative and find myself lost in an open and visual world of places and things I'll probably never see in the flesh but through the app, feel as if I have. The knowledge gained is helping me think about what more Audio Describers could to for me to bring the world alive! Even if you're not playing in the annual competition you should download this app so you can learn how to make your world visible!!