Bringing life to the dark: Audio description

Pauline Brandt: "My name is Pauline Brandt. I'm an audio describer in the theatre, and basically what that is is scripting between dialogue of a play, all the physicality that happens on the stage. So you are in fact creating a little sketch for blind and visually impaired audiences.

"I'd never heard of it in my life. My background was in broadcasting, I was an arts news reporter. So my heart was always in the arts, but I was very used to scripting and producing material. I did an intensive three-month course where I completed the certificate in audio description skills, and it was run by a charity called See A Voice.

"I think you have to have a good sense of timing, you need to have good editorial skills, you need to have good communication skills, you need to be able to liaise and work as a team and be able to work on your own as well.

"The first thing I need to do is to see the play, to get a feel for the characters and the set. And what I do is sit very quietly with a notebook and I sketch people from top to toe. How tall are they? What's their hair like? Is it short, is it long, is it crimped? What's their eyeline like? What's their nose like, their mouth? And not only that, expressions and nuances. Do they fidget? Do they slouch? You start to look at people in a lot more detail, and it's the little things that say a lot more about a character. The job is about precision, and it's also about a lightness of touch as well, because you don't want to be talking in a person's ear.

"Journalism skills are actually a good background, but people have come from all sorts of backgrounds for this. Increasingly, it could be used in more and more contexts, and for more and more people -- paintings, sculpture, architecture and dance. Something like a hundred people a day are diagnosed with some kind of sight problem, and there's macular degeneration which happens as people get older.

"People are very very pleased that this service exists. I've heard people say that it's actually been quite transformative. The idea is to increase access. Not just to tick a box which says 'Disability and Discrimination Act', visually impaired people need to feel welcome in the theatre. And the onus is on us to produce something which is of a high quality.

"It seems like a very good marrying of my skills in broadcasting with a love for the theatre and the arts. The best description I've heard is 'a cross between poetry and live broadcast', and I think that just about sums it up."