vocaleyes research trip - London 4th July - upgrade document

VocalEyes - London - Research Trip 4th July

Accessibility, as an integral part of blind art practice representation, is a principle that the audio-transcribe charitable organisation, VocalEyes, also adhere to. Established in 1998, initially to help theatres and producers meet the needs of blind and partially-sighted audiences (VocalEyes, 2019) has since expanded its work into other areas including museums, galleries, heritage sites and architecture. Through the practice and context review, VocalEyes were identified as a potential network connection with a research trip conducted in July 2019 and a meeting held with Matthew Cock (Chief Executive), Anna Fineman (Museums and programmes manager) and Rachel Hutchinson (doctoral researcher and lecturer at the University of Westminster). During the discussion about this research project, the VocalEyes team emphasised the need for accessibility to be an integral part of the design process and methods of the final practice-based output and signposted the methodology towards emerging immersive accessibility projects such as (IMAC, 2019) which deploy customisable subtitles, audio-description, subtitling and sign-language. In the case of this research project, the team advised that case-studies, narrative enquiry and semi-structured interview questions ought to be framed and posed to elicit detailed visual descriptions, to ensure that accessibility is not an afterthought, but integral to the research design and methods from the outset.

VocalEyes cited an example of accessibility inherent in an immersive creative experience, in the collaborative haptic immersive project Flatland (2015), led by blind artistic director Maria Oshodi. Flatland was a large-scale immersive theatrical production, set in the dark, created by an interdisciplinary team of blind and sighted specialists (Flatland, 2015). Flatland is part performance and part in-the-wild user study, which presented an opportunity to test new forms of technology, utilising a novel shape-changing haptic device, the ‘Animotus’, to guide participants through a dark space to large tactile structures to investigate comparable cultural experiences for blind and sighted attendees (Spiers et al., 2015) . Maria Oshodi is part of the VocalEyes network and, an email introduction and connection was achieved via VocalEyes and future dialogue and connection has been planned for the second year of research.