The power of words

Audio describers allow those with vision loss to still enjoy theater

By Gail Franklin

Editor’s note:“Helping Neighbors” features an exceptional volunteer in Centre County each Monday. To nominate someone for a future story, e-mail cdtnews cdtnewstips@centredaily.com.

CDT/Michelle Bixby

Cindy Shaler, left, of the Sight-Loss Support Group, hands an audio device to Barbara Herman, of Philipsburg, so she can listen to an audio description of the production “The Mouse Trap” at the Boal Barn Playhouse.

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When Cindy Shaler goes to the theater she doesn’t see an actor walk onto the stage. She watches him strut, glide, stumble, hurry or run, but never walk.

The 59-year-old chooses words to describe the body language and speaks them into a covered microphone that transmits her voice to headphones worn by audience members with vision loss.

Shaler has volunteered to bring the stage alive for people with vision loss for five years as a describer for View Via Headphones.

She is also a Festival Eyes Guide, who helps clients tour the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts, and trains new guides.

Both programs are part of the Sight-Loss Support Group of Central Pennsylvania, which named Shaler its volunteer of the year.

Shaler, a State College native who runs her own business as a technical writer, editor and publication designer, said she has learned more in the past five years of audio describing than she did as a theater minor in college.

Shaler and the eight other describers for View Via Headphones describe dance, plays, concerts and even, once, a baseball game. They attend dress rehearsals, and research the performance beforehand to be better prepared.

Just as any audience member reads a program before the show, the describers want to be able to give a short description and some historical context, and to set the scene for their clients, who come to shows 15 minutes early so they can put on their headphones and prepare for the show to begin.

Shaler wanted to work with blind students when she was younger and the volunteer post has now given her an opportunity to connect personally with many clients.

“I feel good for them because there’s pleasure in what we’re providing,” she said.

Otherwise, the clients “would have to have someone sit beside them whispering, which is frowned upon in the theater, or they wouldn’t go at all.”

Rana Arnold, who co-founded the Sight-Loss Support Group, has vision loss and said Shaler is an articulate describer.

Shaler said she got hooked on her first day, when she described the second act of an acrobatic troupe from Taiwan that performed in Eisenhower Auditorium.

In a booth in the back of the auditorium where she used binoculars to see the stage, she watched a performer balance on a precarious structure of chairs that grew to a treacherous height.

Shaler recalled: “It was a heart stopper, and apparently I got that across because I talked to Rana and she said, ‘Wow, that was exciting!’ It was exciting for me and encouraging because I could do it.”

Shaler has also overcome her own physical limitations as a 55- year survivor of diabetes, and Arnold believes that experience has made Shaler more sensitive to the needs of clients with vision loss.

“I think that’s one of the things that makes her the volunteer she is,” Arnold said.

“She is in tune with that and how diabetes changes your life and by extension how vision loss changes your life.”

The group is seeking more describers and would like to provide its services beyond the theater for anyone interested, Shaler said.

For more information, call the office at 238-0132.