In the first four minutes of the Oscar-winning movie Saving Private Ryan, no words are spoken. An elderly man walks slowly through a sprawling military cemetery before he kneels in front of a single headstone and weeps. Then, the scene cuts to 1944, in Normandy, France, where pontoon boats full of American soldiers approach the beach. 

If someone who is blind sits down to experience the original, theater version of the film, they first hear the poignant trumpet-heavy crescendo of John Williams’ “Hymn to the Fallen.” Then, the splashing of waves.

“Imagine being a blind person sitting in the theater with a friend,” Joel Snyder, CAS/BA ’74, says. “You either have no clue what’s going on during a scene like this, or you sit there elbowing your friend next to you asking, ‘What’s going on? What’s going on?’”

In the 1980s, Snyder was among the pioneers of audio description—the vivid oral narration of visual elements in a movie, performance, or exhibition for people who are blind or have low vision. If you experience the televised version of Saving Private Ryan with the audio description track turned on, it is Snyder’s voice you hear. “A thin, gray-haired man in his seventies shuffles along a tree-lined walkway,” he says as the movie opens. For the nearly three hours of the movie, he interjects concise, rich descriptions of characters, battle scenes, gruesome war injuries, and tender moments between soldiers. 

Snyder has written and performed the audio description for thousands of other movies, TV shows, and performances, including Sesame Street and the IMAX film Blue Planet. His voice accompanies one version of President Barack Obama’s 2015 video Christmas card and can be heard on audio tours of exhibitions at the National Museum of American History, Yellowstone National Park, and the Flight 93 National Memorial .

“I feel strongly that audio description helps people who are blind have more exposure to society and to all the cultural resources we have,” Snyder says. “In turn, this makes them more engaged and active citizens.”

Kim Charlson, who was the first female president of the American Council of the Blind and is the executive director of the Perkins Braille and Talking Book Library, agrees. 

“Media is such an important part of our society,” says Charlson, who is blind. “It’s not just entertainment; it represents all sorts of ways to connect with your family and friends and be able to participate in conversations about the latest shows and movies.”

Snyder never planned to revolutionize the world of media for visually impaired people. At AU, he studied education and theater. He intended, after graduation, to teach some combination of English, acting, and public speaking. But, between classes and theater performances, Snyder volunteered as a reader for the Metropolitan Washington Ear—an FM radio station that provided readings of newspapers, books, and magazines for blind and visually impaired people. 

He liked the work and when the Washington Ear proposed a collaboration with Arena Stage to have someone describing the action happening in a performance, Snyder was game to try it. 

“This was 1980, and nothing like this had ever been done before,” Snyder recalls. “We sat down to hammer out the details and had to figure out what to call it. We settled on ‘audio description’ and that name has stuck ever since.”

The summer of 1981 marked the first-ever audio description of a live theater event as part of an Arena Stage performance of George Bernard Shaw’s play Major Barbara. Snyder likens audio description to the play-by-play of a baseball game; he picks and chooses only the most vital bits of action to share, without talking over important sounds and dialogue. 

“It’s like a kind of poetry or even a haiku, because we use as few words as we can to convey a visual image as objectively as possible,” he says. “People who are blind can’t see, but their brains are perfectly intact; they want to make their own inferences and assumptions about what is happening. Instead of saying that a character looks distraught, we might say she has tears streaming down her cheeks.”

In Saving Private Ryan, Snyder doesn’t always need to say there are bullets whizzing through the air—the audience can hear them. He doesn’t need to describe the wincing faces of injured men when the audience can hear their pained cries. But he does describe a soldier throwing aside a typewriter to grab a dead man’s rifle; he describes men crouched behind barricades and how they use a mirror to peek around the edge of a bunker. 

Even those most basic details can make a world of difference to people who can’t see what is happening. 

“Before there was a lot of audio description, I would go to the movies or live theater and do my best to fill in the gaps; I actually thought I was doing pretty well at figuring out the story,” Charlson says. “It wasn’t until I had a chance to see a few plays again with audio description that I realized I had been misinterpreting some major plot points because I was missing the visual cues.”

By the 1990s, Snyder was receiving so many requests to write and voice audio description that he founded his own company, Audio Description Associates, in DC’s Maryland suburbs. Television stations began using the secondary channels that could carry translations of broadcast audio descriptions. Eventually, Congress asked the Federal Communications Commission to study the governance of audio descriptions; their recommendations became part of the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, which requires commercial television stations to provide audio description options for a certain percentage of their prime-time and children’s programming. At the same time, movie theaters and museums started adding audio description to many of their most popular films and exhibitions. 

“This field is no longer in its infancy,” Snyder says. “I think we’re in our adolescence. But there still needs to be greater recognition of the people who write and voice audio description—they need to be credited and paid properly.”

Creating audio description is time-consuming, Snyder says. In the earliest days of his audio description for live theatrical events, he might have attended a show a few times or watched a video of it, taken extensive notes, and then performed the audio description live at a few performances. Now, the process is more carefully scripted. Writing audio description for movies and television, he says, can take at least half an hour per five minutes of film—that translates to days of work for a feature-length movie.

In 2010, Snyder partnered with the American Council of the Blind (ACB) to launch the Audio Description Project, a formal effort to boost awareness of the practice, train writers, and recognize the best audio description projects. He has since offered 22 training programs in the US—two a year for more than a decade—and spoken about audio description in 65 countries. While most of his training is geared toward teaching sighted people how to notice imagery and choose key visual elements to describe, Snyder says that collaborations with blind people are critical for the field. 

“The sad truth is that a lot of audio description writers today have never met anybody who is blind, and that shouldn’t be the case,” he says. “It’s important to have people who are blind or have low vision involved in audio description as writers, quality control experts, voice talents, or audio editors.”

In the United States, more than 32 million people have some degree of vision loss—even with glasses, their vision is worse than 20/40. About 70 percent of them are unemployed. Snyder thinks that giving them access to cultural resources through audio description can help change this. 

“I’ve heard a number of people say that the hardest thing about being blind isn’t the blindness, it’s the way other people and society as a whole treat them,” he says. “If there were audio description everywhere, I think some of that exclusion would go away.”

The ACB’s Audio Description Project website has more than 10,000 titles in their catalog of audio description projects—a reference for blind people who want to find accessible media, performances, museums, and parks. 

“At first it sounds like a lot. Ten thousand is an exciting number,” says Tabitha Kenlon, the audio description project coordinator at the ACB. “But then it’s also like: is that all? So now we’re moving on to the next ten thousand.”

Snyder thinks that advances in technology, if used right, could make audio description easier to access. Already, smartphone apps can be used to listen to the audio description for some movies, which means people who want to access the description don’t need to seek out special devices and headsets when they visit a theater. But movie studios, for legal and copyright reasons, aren’t always willing to share their audio descriptions with these kinds of apps. Snyder, though, thinks it’s an untapped market—he’s heard not only endless praise of audio description by people who are blind and low-vision, but also from those who just like to consume media without their eyes on a screen. 

“You can listen to a movie instead of an audiobook when you’re on a run, or a long car ride,” he says. “You can be watching a movie, walk into the other room to make a sandwich and not miss a beat.”

Snyder is continuing to sing the praises of audio description as he trains new audio describers around the world and works on an official certification program. After more than 40 years, Snyder isn’t tired of sitting down to write the words that will make the world more vivid for people who can’t see it. 

“He is absolutely legendary. Everyone in the field of audio description knows who he is because he’s been around since the beginning and has helped it develop,” Kenlon says. “He’s a tireless evangelist for audio description.”