Hello lovely people! Greetings from Hobart, where I'm the Accessibility Project Coordinator for Mona (the Museum of Old and New Art) and its festivals.
We're investigating providing audio description for a contemporary dance performance for Mona Foma 2024 and I'm looking around to see what equipment is being used in venues and organisations.
Audio description is fairly new in Tasmania but there is demand in our blind community especially. A group of six performing and visual arts professionals, including me, are being trained and mentored by experienced describer Clare Spillman, who originally trained and worked in the UK.
If anyone has insights into the best equipment for description, I'd love to hear your thoughts! The performance in 2024 will be in a 750 seat theatre. The largest indoor performance venue in Tasmania is a 5,500 person arena.
Hello! Ours at Yale Rep Theatre is pretty simple/ basic but you could explore more high tech options if it's something you'll be offering regularly. We provide description using the same units that provide our Assistive Listening. They are FM radio units and are tuned to a different frequency than our audio enhancement. I believe that the brand is Williams Sound. We provide those with single earsets so the patron can still hear music, etc from the performance. It's been very effective for us. Best wishes to you!
That's great Laura, thank you! It turns out our local theatre has a similar system that has multiple channels but they only have one transmitter. I'm working with them to see if they can purchase a second transmitter, because turning off the hearing loop to turn on audio description is certainly not an option!