From old episodes of Perry Mason on AMI to the 2011 Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate on CBC to Love On the Spectrum on Netflix. Our latest guest has described it all.

This week on Outlook we speak with Ruth Barrett, who attended the London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art, who started out as a performer, in the theatre, as a voiceover artist, but she eventually found her way into the world of doing closed captioning work first and then audio description.

She loves English and history and her curiosity, all helpful interests and qualities for a describer to have. We speak with Ruth about how her previous skill set was applied to becoming an audio describer and writer, for Accessible Media Inc. and other networks, which led to her doing this work for live performances at the Stratford Festival which began offering selected audio described shows around 2012.

Ruth loves to speak with users of her live theatre audio description and shares how she likes meeting with them after the show and receiving their feedback.

With terms like forced naming, Barrett tells us what she’s learned about best practices over her years doing this work and how she’s loved getting to do more work collaboratively on a team along with the others over at Descriptive Video Works based in BC, but virtual has allowed people, like Ruth who live all the way back over in Stratford, Ontario to be on that team.

Our guest this week explains how she works diligently to provide the best possible audio description experience for the users of the service that she can.