73 VOL. 68, NO. 1, SPRING 2009 Human Organization, Vol. 68, No. 1, 2009 Copyright © 2009 by the Society for Applied Anthropology 0018-7259/09/010073-09$1.40/1 Introduction What would I do if a bomb went off? Could I ind the exit quickly? Would anyone bother to come and get me? Or leave me, a hopeless casualty, though I’d ironically appreciate, their usual brand of pity. If I dived for cover, might I dive TOWARDS the bomb? In a direction completely wrong? In a tragic blind swan song? …Big tabloid exposure! Dead guide dog and owner! by Damon Rose, British poet, 1996 G enerally speaking, we live in a highly visual world. This article asks us to consider the implications of conveying exclusively visual content to a non-visual audience. In so doing, it speaks to some of the larger questions Describing tragedy: the information access needs of Blind People in Emergency-related Circumstances Elaine Gerber Audio description is a technique used for “translating” visual material to aural readers/blind people. In this article, exploratory research on audio description (AD) is presented, which raises important questions in the ield of applied anthropology and emergency planning: How does one translate visual material for a non-seeing audience? From the point of view of blind consumers, what constitutes “good” description? What speciic information access needs do they have in event of emergencies? Selected results are presented from three telephone focus groups on AD, conducted with 39 blind or visually impaired people nationwide in the United States during September/October 2005. This paper addresses emergency planning, audio description, and the need for more accurate information access for blind people during public warning broadcasts and in delivering the news. Further, it examines existing guidelines for the inclusion of blind people in the provision of emergency information and concludes that successful emergency preparedness must include irst-hand expertise of disabled people themselves. Key words: emergency preparedness, audio description, visual culture, blindness Dr. Gerber is an assistant professor of Anthropology at Montclair State University in New Jersey. She formerly served as the Senior Research Associate at the American Foundation for the Blind. gerbere@mail. montclair.edu The author would like to thank the New School University’s Faculty Development Fund, the American Foundation for the Blind, and Montclair State University for their support of this research. about the difference at the heart of applied anthropology, and in particular to the social nature of disability (Barnes, Mercer, and Shakespeare 1999; Davis 1997; Linton 1998; Oliver 1990). Anthropological literature dealing with the cultural construction of citizenship (Das and Addlakha 2001; Rapp and Ginsburg 2001), as well as literature from visual an- thropology, which addresses descriptions, resonates strongly here (Grimshaw 2001; Hockings 2003). Further research has shown how utterly visual news coverage has become: following Hurricane Katrina in the United States, where pictures alone were left to describe the color of poverty in America, and where the images of disabled people—as well as the elderly and the poor—were portrayed as symbols of hopelessness and tragedy (Finger 2006; Fjord 2006). In this piece, I foreground disabled people as consumers of those images, in addition to serving as the content for those repre- sentations. Instead of presuming a cultural readership that can see, I focus on the opposite. This article documents the need for audio description (AD)—a technique used for “translat- ing” visual material to “aural readers”—and more accurate verbal descriptions of the news for blind people, 1 particularly (although not exclusively) in the cases of emergencies. Fur- ther, it examines existing guidelines for the inclusion of blind people in evacuation plans and the provision of emergency information, and concludes that successful planning and emergency preparedness must include irst-hand expertise of disabled people themselves. Blind people in the United States are information- deprived in at least two key ways, regarding (1) news