“How do we make Audio Description Cheap?”:
What Leaders Are Really Asking The Question Behind The Question “Can we make audio description cheap so it can scale?” When leaders say this, they’re being honest, in a lot of ways. “Budgets are tight.” “Energy is limited.” “We need to do so much more, so cut corners to do more.” There are already too […]
Want More Audio Description? Ask These Three Questions
When A Title Drops Without Audio Description, People Get Angry. I get it. I’m on the side of access and dignity, every time. But there’s a message I keep seeing that backfires, even when it’s said with good intent: “Audio description is cheap, so there’s no excuse.” I’m not judging the intent. I’m correcting the […]
Audio Description Is Trust, A Case Study From Paramount’s 4th Annual Summit on Disability
With Deep Thanks to Attendees, Participants, and Paramount’s Content Engagement, Partnership & Strategy Team Invitation And Stakes I was invited to Paramount’s 4th Annual Summit on Disability by a blind engineer to lead a Audio Description workshop. That detail matters. Audio description was created by blind people, for blind people. So my goal was simple: teach […]
Context + Intent: The Two-Word Fix For Friday-Night Video Chaos
How to make voice, accessibility, and AI decisions that hold up under pressure In my last post, I talked about the “Friday-night problem.” The scramble. The comment pile. The victim-y heroics. And the way “we have to” turns choice into burden, which turns the work into minimum viable effort. Here’s the hinge that changes everything. […]
When Neutral Means No One: Voice, Power, and Access
I didn’t realize how much power a voice had until I heard one that wasn’t supposed to exist. It was a synthetic narrator.Super clear. Calm. Conversational. Sophisticated, even. And completely wrong for the story it was telling. It had replaced a human actor for a series on TV. There were some imperfections in that human […]
The Dangerous Myth of the “Neutral” Voice
The voice was clear.Confident.Professional. It just didn’t sound like a person. Something was …off. As we build synthetic voices, there’s a temptation to praise it with how “conversational” it sounds. With that conversational, even a human voice that doesn’t take into consideration the context of what is happening around what it’s saying, the default “neutral” […]
Escape Competition Through Authenticity: Why Storytelling Still Wins in an AI World
(with gratitude to Jordan Morrow for the spark) What Is Happening? We’re living in a moment where everything seems to accelerate! AI models update faster than we can track, workflows get optimized weekly, and conversations often focus on scale, speed, and the next “smarter” tool. But underneath all the technical layers, something older and more […]