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.

Good variety of artificial and human audio descriptions. Some descriptions have ambient sounds supplementing the descriptions. There is one persistent issue with the audio descriptions across all parks that have them: the first section, "Overview of Audio Description," stops playing after ten seconds. No other sections in any parks have this issue.

This app is easy to use and provides options for the user. It's really for anyone who wants to listen to the text of park brochures rather than read it. I love it!! 9/2022- I'm still using it and still loving it! It's awesome to listen to the Unigrid while you're driving to the park site. It prepares for what you are about to experience.