ATU796 – Minds Eye with Magan Harms

Hi, this is Magan Harms and I’m the director of Audio Description and the ADA coordinator of MindsEye Radio. And this is your Assistive Technology Update.

Hello, and welcome to Your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist individuals with disabilities and special needs. I’m your host, Josh Anderson, with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to episode 796 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on August 28th, 2026. Listeners, as some of you know, our show here is in Indiana. In Indiana, we’re known for really two things. We’re known for the Indianapolis 500 and basketball.

And I recently heard from one of our partners at a local university that they’re working with our pro basketball teams, the Pacers and the Fever on a project to make the games and the whole experience more accessible to all fans, and I couldn’t wait to hear more about it. So, please join me in welcoming Magan Harms from MindsEye Radio to the show to hear how they’re working to make sports events and a whole lot more more accessible to all people. Magan, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, I am excited to just learn more about MindsEye Radio and everything. But before we do that, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Sure. I live in the St. Louis area, which is where MindsEye is. We’re actually on the border, so we’re on the Illinois side. And I have lots of plants sitting here to make me happy. And I’ve been an audio describer since about 2017. And I started as a volunteer with MindsEye and took over the program in 2019 to run the Audio Description program.

That is awesome. Well, you already kind of started bringing us into it. So, Magan, as I’m talking about it, should I call it MindsEye, MindsEye Radio? Does it matter?

We generally just say MindsEye only because while we do do radio, when we talk about Audio Description, sometimes people get confused and they think that they can listen to our Audio Description on the radio, which you cannot. So, we generally just say MindsEye.

Perfect. Well then onto MindsEye, what is it?

MindsEye is a nonprofit organization here in the St. Louis area that began in 1973. And it started as a radio information service, which for those of you who don’t know, it’s a radio station that is made specifically for folks who are blind or have low vision or have print disabilities. Meaning at the time in 1973, if you wanted to read the newspaper and you couldn’t see the newspaper or you couldn’t hold the newspaper, you just didn’t know it was in the newspaper. So, in 1973, we were starting as a radio information service. They began reading the local newspapers on a radio station that was specifically for people who were blind. So, that grew and we still are radio information service.

We read all of the local newspapers, but we also read Time and People Magazine and TV Guide. But the most popular are the Schnooks Ads, which is the local grocery store. People want to know what produce is on sale and the obituaries. They’re always very popular for us. And then as time went on, MindsEye added Adaptive Athletics. MindsEye has a beep baseball team, which is just like it sounds, a baseball that beeps. So, we have a team called the Gateway Archers, and they participate in nationwide events, including the World Series, which we hosted here the last couple of years.

And we also do a lot of adaptive athletics, like demos in schools and corporate places so people understand what people who are blind might enjoy playing baseball. But then there is my department, which is Audio Description, and we are going to be celebrating our 10-year Audio Description anniversary. They started MindsEye started doing Audio Description for just a couple events here and there around 2016, 2017. And I started as a volunteer. And at the time I started as a volunteer at the time, they were using volunteer audio describers. We now use all trained paid contractors as our audio describers because we are access providers. It’s a profession. And I took over the program in 2019 as staff.

And those first couple years, we had I think seven events and eight events. And this year in 2026, we are currently at 134 events this year, and the year hasn’t ended. So, there will be more events. Yeah, that’s what’s currently scheduled in 2026.

Oh, that’s awesome. Magan, for our listeners who maybe don’t really know what Audio Descriptions are, I guess what kind of information is relayed through Audio Descriptions?

Sure. First of all, we provide Audio Description at a variety of different types of events. A lot of people, when they think of Audio Description, they think of now a lot of streaming services on your TV and movies. What we’re doing Audio Description for is live events. So, we do a lot of live theater. And so, at live theater, we are describing… we’ll do some pre-show notes to get some of the stuff out of the way before it starts, and we’ll talk about costumes and sets. But then during the show, we are describing everything that’s visual, but we have to describe it in between the dialogue or important sound effects.

So, we’re still describing the set and the costumes, but we’re also describing facial expressions. We’re describing activity, fights, dance. We just described newsies, which if you’re familiar with that musical, has a lot of dancing in it. So, everything that’s happening that is visual, that’s what we’re describing. But then we also describe sporting events. So, it’s a little bit different for sporting events. When we describe all of our description again is live in person. So, we are in Stadia and the people we are describing too are also in Stadia. So, we are describing not just what’s happening on the field or the pitch or the court, but the whole fan experience.

So, for instance, because we’re in St. Louis, well, actually I should use the Pacers and the Fever as an example instead. We appreciate it. Yes. So, when we are in Cambridge, our describers are perched up high. They’re up in the press area looking down. But they actually start describing before the game starts, they describe the pregame and halftime shows, which I had no idea. I did not know that the pregame shows for the Pacers could be anything. I went there one time. The first game that I went to, it was Lunar New Year. And so, I looked up and there were dragons and there were dancers and I thought, “Oh man, our describers were not prepared for what is happening out there right now.”

So, they describe everything. But then during the game, during gameplay, yes, they are doing play-by-play, but they’re also doing play-by-play plus. So, my favorite thing to describe is Cardinals baseball. I love to describe baseball. So, we will describe a lot of the hitters’ stance, how they are standing, because every person is different, how each person looks in the batter’s box. Also, things like who’s wearing high socks that day? This guy has on striped socks. This guy’s wearing pink cleats today, that sort of thing. But then also, what are the mascots doing? I know Boomer comes down from the ceiling of at Gainbridge and comes out of nowhere. That’s really exciting.

So, we do a lot, a lot of fan experience Audio Description. If you’re familiar with soccer here in St. Louis, we have St. Louis City SC, which it’s a newer soccer team. It’s part of MLS. And the first match for them we had, we knew it was really important. We asked, of course, what is going to be really important for you to hear when we describe this? And someone told us they were really excited to know what the tifo looks like, which is the tifo is the giant big banner flag that rolls out. And our describers didn’t know in advance what it was going to look like, but it’s enormous.

It covered an entire seating section. So, as it was being unfurled, our describers were describing it in real time. So, everyone in the stadium was seeing this for the first time, along with the people who were blind were understanding what it looked like at the same time. And even though we described the whole match, we described everything, that was the immediate feedback that we got was, “I can’t believe I got to know at the same time what that looked like.” So, we focus a lot on fan experience.

No, I love that. And you brought up so many good points. I think about being at a game and yeah, you can hear what the team’s doing, but then a mascot shows up, a big thing’s unfold or something, and you hear everyone cheer. What’s everyone cheering for? They’re inbounding the ball or something else is happening. What’s everybody? So, you’re really just giving them such a rich experience. And Magan, it sounds like my personal nightmare to try to describe all those things at once. So, I guess-

Sometimes.

… just a little bit of behind the scenes, what kind of training goes into helping someone be a really good audio describer?

Yeah, that’s a great question because there is a lot of training. I feel like training never ends.

Oh, no.

No. We’re training every day for something and forever. But I am a lifelong learner. I will learn about anything any day. But in general, so we started out with our training from the American Council of the Blind from their Audio Description project. And that has really evolved to other types of training. So, we don’t have necessarily the same describer who describes opera is not describing basketball or soccer. So, we participate in a lot of specific trainings.

So, we have some folks that describe dance more often. And so, there is a great person who’s out there whose name is Krishna Washburn, and she’s from Dark Room Ballet, and she is a ballet dancer who is blind, who teaches blind ballet dancers. And she also teaches Audio Description. And so, she has all of these different things. So, we pick a lot of different training from a lot of different places and are constantly training more and more. I will say that Audio Description is not for everyone.

We have people that will go through training and then get there the day of and just say, “Nope, this is not for me. It seemed like a great idea. It seemed like a great idea. I thought I was prepared. You’ll never see me again.” Which is fine. It’s fine that you recognize that. And it’s really different to describe something like a play or a musical where we do a lot of prep work for plays and musicals. Well, for everything, but for a play or a musical, we get the script in advance. We send out actor questionnaires so we can ask the actors, “How do you describe the way that you look?” We might not use their words. Someone might say, “I’m a Black man,” and someone else might say, “I’m an African-American man.”

Okay. So, when we introduce them, we’re going to use the terms that they use. So, we do character questionnaires. We have the script in advance. We preview those shows. Sometimes, we go to rehearsals or tech rehearsals. We also have paid quality control specialists who are blind who give us feedback. So, that’s one whole set of work. And then for our sports folks, there is nothing more annoying to me when you’re listening your regular sports, your team. I, again, love to listen to Cardinals baseball, but then it’s that one day where some other broadcaster is on or some other channel is picking it up and they mispronounce somebody’s name and you think, how is it possible?

How is it possible that you don’t know this guy’s name? And so, things like that, our sports describers have to know. They have to know the pronunciations. You have to know the sport. You can’t just say, “Oh, I’m an audio describer, so I’m going to go and describe basketball.” Listen, I am not describing basketball. It is way too fast for me. I would just be like, they’re running-

They’re shooting.

… they shoots.” Yeah. We talk a lot about in sports Audio Description about describing where the ball or the puck is, not who has the ball. Because if you just heard over and over 14 to 12 to 24 to 36 and they’re just giving numbers, that means absolutely nothing. Or even if you heard Bob, to Susan, to Sharon, that still means nothing, especially if you’re not familiar with the team. If you don’t know every player’s names, I think of spring training baseball. We don’t know any of those guys’ names when they come to spring training, and it just doesn’t mean anything. So, instead we’re following the ball. Where is it on the court or the pitch? Is it at half court? Where are you?

How close are they to the goal or the basket? Who has the ball? And just because our describers know where every player plays doesn’t mean that everyone in the audience knows where every player plays. So, we might say Walker caught it, but we might also say, it’s out to left fields. Walker caught it. Things like that.

So, I got to ask you, Magan, and this is maybe too personal, but as a fan, if you were doing the Audio Description for the St. Louis Cardinals and they hit a grand slam home run to win the game, does your excitement come through in there as well?

Absolutely. Honestly, Audio Description has evolved a lot through the years, and particularly the last 10 years and the last five years, Audio Description in everything was very almost mono challenge. And first of all, there’s no such thing as being objective as an audio describer. People will train you and tell you over and over, you have to be objective.

Not when it comes to sports or anything like that. Nope, not a chance.

And even if you’re trying to be objective, your background and your information is going to skew what you think you’re being objective, but maybe you’re not, and that’s going to come across. But then it also is really boring to just hear somebody, “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” So, we had folks tell us it’s more exciting when you’re excited. Now that doesn’t mean you trash talk the other team or that sort of thing.

True, true.

But you can absolutely… And then think about when you’re listening to your radio announcers or your television announcers, they’re excited. Those are the best calls in sports when they’re excited. And so, that’s what we feel that people who are blind deserve to have that same experience. It doesn’t mean. I have been told maybe you should tone it down, tone it down a little bit. You got a little too excited, especially if it’s somebody that comes from out of town or it’s somebody that’s there to see. Oftentimes in St. Louis, the Cubs are in town and we’ll have a lot of Cubs fans and they’ll be like, “Well, you’re definitely a Cardinals fan.” I’m like, “Well, yeah.”

Well, if they’re old enough Cub fans, then they’re used to Harry Caray. So, if you mispronounce all the names, they’re probably fine with that. So, Magan, how do folks access Audio Descriptions?

That’s a great question. It depends on what kind of description we’re doing. So, in most theaters, we still use radio frequency devices, which you would show up at guest services or wherever the place is, and you would pick up a little headset and a little receiver. And somewhere in the theater, somebody’s talking into a microphone that’s going directly to you in the headset. For sporting events and a lot of things that are outdoors, like parades, parades are always fun to describe, or things like that. Things where you would maybe have your phone on already. We use an app. We use an app called LiveVoice, and it was actually designed for language translation.

So, if you were at a meeting and everyone was speaking Spanish, we could have a translator there who would talk to you through this app that would speak in English so you could understand. And we started using LiveVoice for Audio Description at all of our sporting events. And it’s great because you can use your own device. You’re using your own phone, your own tablet. You already have all the settings that you like. You know how to use the voiceover or the screen reader on that device. You have all the control and you have the headset, the headphones that you like, everything is there for you.

But the other great thing is when you go into a place like Gainbridge Fieldhouse, if you’re using your phone in your own app, you don’t have to come and find me somewhere to hand you a headphone, and then you don’t have to get back to me at the end of the game when you’re just trying to get out of the parking lot. So, that is really great. So, a lot of times at those sporting events, we never see the actual patrons who are listening because we don’t need to. They can go directly to their seats. And all of those places, you can be sitting anywhere in the stadium.

So, it takes out a lot of the hassle of trying to figure out, “Okay, I have to get there early because I have to walk halfway around the stadium to pick this thing up. And then what if I leave early?” And all of that stuff. So, it makes it a lot easier.

No, it’s great. It just makes it so much more accessible because yeah, you’re not adding an extra thing to do. Maybe getting in my seat’s already a little bit of a challenge, getting through the crowd, through the people, through everything else to not have to go to an extra place, plus wait in line for beer and food and everything else. Magan, you’ve been doing this for a while. Do you get a story of maybe something you were able to audio describe or maybe a story from a person who was able to access those that sticks with you?

Oh gosh, there are so many. I would say a couple things. Again, one of my favorite things to describe is Cardinals baseball, but the first time that I described Cardinal Baseball, the most exciting part was the part that I hate throwing baseball games usually is the crowd started to do the wave. And there happened to be a group that was sitting near us where we describe in the stadium. We’re not in the press box at Bush Stadium, so we’re in a different spot, but we could see the group. It was a big group of people. We could see this group of people in front of us. And I just started to describe what the wave was. What does it actually mean to do the wave?

So, you’re going to stand up, you’re going to throw your hands in the air and usually say, “Woo-hoo,” as it goes by. And we are able to say, “Okay, here’s where it is. This is the section. It’s getting closer, it’s getting closer.” And I said, “Here comes, it’s getting closer, it’s closer.” And then I just yelled, “Go, go, go, go.” And it was awesome to see all these folks stand up at the exact same second as everyone else. And we got immediate feedback on that of we’ve never been able to. I’ve never done it at the same time. It’s usually my buddy being like, “Okay, stand up,” and never really participating it in that way. And also just really simple things.

I didn’t really understand that’s what you did during the wave. I didn’t really understand it was this ripple effect of thousands of people doing this ripple all the way around the stadium. So, that one was really fun. And you mentioned Indiana and the Indianapolis 500. I have been lucky enough to, for the last two years, and this year in particular, describe the Indianapolis 500.

Oh, cool. Cool.

Thanks to some folks that you might know over at Tactile Engineering with the Cadence Tablet, they were there with the Cadence tablet. And so, I was doing Audio Description for anyone who was there listening, but also so that people who are using the Cadence as a refreshable braille display or a tactile device could also have Audio Description. And it was really cool to be there for the closest race in history.

I know.

And honestly, it was just me screaming. It was just me screaming, “Rosenquist, Rosenquist, Rosenquist,” and then a pause. And then I said, “Was it Rosenquist?” Because it was so close that in the end, I just looked around the press box like, “Did I just call that correctly? It seemed right.” I encouraged people during the race to listen to the broadcast instead of the Audio Description unless something happened. I was there, I was describing. But we did a lot of work in advance. We made, and it’s out there on YouTube, we made a audio spotter guide that was a YouTube audio only with a picture of the car, a description of all 33 cars in the field because things that people don’t realize, every car looks different.

I mean, it’s the same body of the car. So, there was one description was, this is what an IndyCar looks like. And then the livery, the paint, the colors of every single car because everyone is different. And I really thought nobody’s really going to listen to this or they’re going to look for one car. And I had so many sighted folks that reached out and were like, “This is really cool that you have all of this information here.” And I thought, “Well, you can just look at the pictures. You can just look at the video. We made the audio guide for people who are blind,” but that was something that was really interesting.

But we described a lot of the stuff that happened before the race, but it’s also really fun to describe a crash. So, yes, while it’s happening, you’re just like, “Crash, babe. Oh, he hit the wall.” But then you have all that time. Usually when there’s a yellow and they’re cleaning it up, they’re playing those replays over and over and saying, “Okay, this is what the replay shows to me. This is what it looks like.” And I can hear the announcers because I was in the press box, so I could hear, okay, this is the analysis that they’re getting over there and this is what they’re being told. So, now let me describe how cool it looked when they crashed, that sort of thing. So, that’s really fun.

It’s a really different experience. I’ve done so many things that I would never have been able to do. I described the Paralympics, the Beijing Paralympics for NBC Sports. I was not in China. That was the pandemic here, so no one really was in China, but it was really cool to walk down the hall and be like, “These are all the NBC sports folks are in the same building with me. We’re all here together.” And it was really cool to have this accessibility as just part of the regularness of what was happening.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, that’s so cool. That’s so cool. Well, Magan, we got just a tiny bit of time here left. If our listeners want to find out more about MindsEye, what’s a good way for them to do that?

Sure. You should check out our website at mindseyeradio.org, or you can also reach out to me at ad@mindseyeradio.org.

All right. We will put all that information in the show notes so the folks can check it out, find out more, learn more, and even ask questions and find out some things. But Magan, thank you so much for coming on today for telling us about the great things that you all do. And again, a resource that up until recently, I wasn’t even sure was available, but thanks for making so many more things accessible to folks who are blind or low vision.

Of course, thanks for having me.

Do you have a question about Assistive Technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on an Assistive Technology Update? If so, call our listener line at 317-721-7124. Send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org or shoot us a note on Twitter @indataproject. Our captions and transcripts for the show are sponsored by the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation or InTRAC. You can find out more about InTRAC at relayindiana.com. A special thanks to Nicole Prieto for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule. Today’s show was produced, edited, hosted, and fraught over by yours truly.

The opinions expressed by our guest are their own and may or may not reflect those of the INDATA Project, Easterseals Crossroads, our supporting partners or this host. This was your Assistive Technology Update, and I’m Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye-bye.