Points of Exclusion

Two of my primary deliverables, the 30-45 minute audio drama and the logo, unfortunately exclude certain groups of people just because of the nature of their mediums. The audio drama excludes people who are hard of hearing and/or deaf, and the logo excludes people who are blind and/or have sight impairments. But this also extends to temporary and situational instances, creating mismatched human interactions. For example, someone on a crowded train might not be able to properly hear my audio drama if they don’t have access to headphones at that time. Someone might not be able to see the logo for my audio drama properly if they’re outside in the bright sun and their device has a glare on it. 

Design Solutions

One way to fix this issue is to include the full transcript complete with all dialogue, background ambience, music, and sound effects with my audio drama. Depending on what platform I decide to post my audio drama on, I would either include a link to a Google Doc with the transcript, paste it into the description, or sync captions with sound with Spotify. This article details the feature, and although it’s fairly new and they say that both Premium and free users have access to it, I went onto the app and tried to use the feature on a podcast episode and nothing came up for me. Either way, I will make sure that some kind of transcript is included with my audio drama. To address the exclusion point with my logo, I am planning on including alt text that describes my logo as thoroughly as possible. While these features will benefit anyone with a permanent hearing or sight disability, it also benefits those with temporary or situational disabilities, as I stated earlier. 

Distribution

I am planning on using social media to create awareness about and distribute my project. When I go to post the actual project, I was planning on using either SoundCloud or Spotify. However, this also poses points of exclusion, mainly for people who have a seeing disability or just don’t have access to technology with social media on it. I do not have a specific demographic in mind for my audio drama- honestly, I’ll be thrilled if anyone of any age or background decides to listen to/view it. I think that most of them will be younger people, since those are the majority of people on social media platforms such as Instagram. In order to increase my chances of reaching the widest audience possible, I am going to create a teaser/trailer that is about 30 seconds-1 minute long and post it on social media. I would like to have a specific social media page dedicated to just this capstone project as opposed to using my personal account, but I will also be reposting to my personal account as well in order to widen my potential audience.