The box of brochures that came in the mail was like a packet of seeds that planted these ideas, but the UniD (“UniDescription”) Project officially started in the fall of 2014, when principal investigator Dr. Brett Oppegaard moved from Washington State University Vancouver to University of Hawai‘i. During this transition, he was working with Michele Hartley at Harpers Ferry Center on accessibility issues related to printed National Park Service products, such as the “Unigrid” brochures, and started envisioning the potential of mobile technologies to remediate and translate those static texts into acoustic forms. Once in Manoa, he began collaborating with two scholars who have spent their careers focused upon issues of accessibility, Dr. Megan Conway and Dr. Thomas Conway, then both serving in the UH Center on Disability Studies. For source material, Hartley sent the UH-based research team the aforementioned suitcase-sized box, filled with hundreds of brochures. And that's when this adventure really took off.
For a bit of additional background, in the late 1970s, designer Massimo Vignelli worked with Harpers Ferry Center staff to create the "Unigrid System," upon which all National Park Service brochures since have been based. The self-described "information architect," who also helped to design the innovative New York subway map, favored a modular system with a subtextual grid that facilitated order and consistency.
Our web-based project – with direct connections to Harpers Ferry Center, the National Park Service, those brochures, and those basic beliefs – has been called "UniDescription," or "UniD" for short, in tribute. That name should be pronounced like "unity," serving as both an abbreviation of the more wonky original label of "UniDescription" and as an inspiration for our mission, which is to:
Bring unity (through UniD) to the world of audio description.
