Audio description voiceover: An antenna on a spinning globe. Channel 31 presents. Animated vintage style radios and microphones appear and spin. A line of cascading headphones. Broadcast Australia logo appears. Map of Australia, zoom into Melbourne 3RPH FM 1179khz AM. Daytime outside the Vision Australia Wicking Centre entrance. Vision Australia Radio. Studio 1. Tim McQueen, Morning Paper Round and Cover to Cover.
Tim McQueen: I had a corneal transplant when I was around seven, my mother was legally blind and I have a nephew who was deaf and blind very close to birth, so I’ve always known people with visual problems, and I decided that I’d like to do something to help.
AD voiceover: Ian Eastham, Vision Sports and Topical Island.
Ian Eastham: I myself have a little eye problem, a bit of a retinopathy issue. I was in between jobs, I had a couple of part time jobs and I thought I needed something else to keep me out of mischief, so I had a look on the Go Volunteer website and there was a position here for technical operator. I thought, “I have the skill set to fit that,” and that was ten years ago, still here.
ADV: Stephen Jolley, long term volunteer.
Stephen Jolley: In the early 2000s, a number of blindness organisations came together to form Vision Australia, and the Association for the Blind was one of those, so the service carried across to Vision Australia and here we have Vision Australia Radio today.
Tim: It started in a house here in Kooyong, many years ago with the gentlemen called Stephen Jolley and Najru West, and they were two of the initiators of the program. I got involved with it in the early 2000s, about the time I retired.
V: Stella Glorie.
Stella Glorie: I didn’t have blindness or low vision myself, but I knew I wanted to work for a not-for-profit and I love radio, so it’s kind of a dream working here. It’s a privilege and it’s what I wanted to do, and that’s really why I chose it. I didn’t know a lot about blindness or low vision before I started here, and I’d like to think I know a lot more.
V: Ian.
Ian: The station itself is obviously aimed at people with vision impairment or low vision, so there’s a lot of reading of newspapers that goes on here for people who can’t read themselves. There’s also a lot of our listeners who do not have English as their first language, so this is the way they learn English. They can read along with the newspapers, and that sort of stuff.
V: Stephen.
Stephen: Many of us believe that probably one of the most significant inconveniences of blindness or low vision is lack of access to information, and that goes for anybody who has difficulty reading, so radio is a good way to address that. It was around the time that the government, initially under the Whitlam government, decided to open up the broadcast bands, so we realised that here was a real opportunity to make use of the radio even more. It’s always been the sort of thing that’s been very important to people who are blind or have low vision, but to do so even more to provide information that otherwise wasn’t available.
V: Matt Lee, Vision Sports.
Matt Lee: So I did get assistance through Vision Australia through my schooling, so I gathered the understanding of Vision Australia and what they offered to a whole range of people and what they do. The facilities here at Vision Australia Radio are first class, and definitely up to the standards of what the present day commercial radio studios are, which we have at a lot of the different stations around Australia and at organisations, so Vision Australia is certainly at the forefront of technology and use of studio equipment. We have a really good sized studio, we have these really good mics, the listeners know if there’s a little technical glitch, they know if a guest’s not ready, so from a production element point of view it’s really important that we are professional, and that we have the highest quality of production going around.
Tim: This building was refurbished a couple of years ago and we changed from one side of the building to the other, and this is a lot better than the facilities that we used to have.
V: Broadcast Australia Radio. Harriet Moffat, Seeing Eye Dogs Program.
Harriet Moffat: I’ve been working for Vision Australia kind of doing- I started with work experience, and then I was doing an internship here, so it kind of all made sense. They knew how much I loved dogs, so I started with that, and then when my host left at the end of last year I think I thought, “I may as well make it easier for myself and do both roles, so I’ve been hosting for about two or three months.”
Tim: I do work on the radio, I also do work with what’s called audio description, they’re my two main areas of work here. In audio description what we do is we go to live theatre, opera, ballet and the major musicals, and we describe for the vision impaired the settings and what’s happening so they can participate fully in the performance. Well I have two programs really, I do the Morning Paper Round where we read from the Age and the Herald Sun once every week, but I have a program called Cover to Cover, and Cover to Cover covers anything: blogs, memoirs, short stories, poetry, anything you like we would cover. I’ve got a team of about ten readers, we choose material, and then I put it together as a program, it goes to air twice a week. I get here about quarter to six in the morning, I go through the Age and the Herald Sun and I select articles to read, we go to air at 7:30 and we go through until 10:30, and after that I then start going through material for Cover to Cover, so I spend a little over a day a week essentially on this work.
Ian: On the Saturdays I do the sports show which is a two hour live-to-air show, and that takes a couple of hours prior to the air time to put the show together, it’s just a really compact two hour do everything really quickly. So that’s both in reading out the newspaper, what’s on the internet, and the conversation between the presenters, the results from last night’s sport. Then we have a look at what else happened during the week and what’s coming up for the week, so it’s a pretty tight show by the time you cover all the major sports plus some of the minor sports, and you pack it all into a two hour slot. If we know there’s something going on like the Australian Open, we’ll try and tee up telephone interviews with a sports personality. I do another show called Topical Island, and that’s a pre-recorded show, we record that on Thursday nights and we go to air the following Saturday. We just grab a topic and tear it to shreds, see what turns up. That’s done outside of here, we just email each other and have our own Facebook page and we put the show together there, and bring all the documentation in and record it. Not a lot of people are actually vision impaired, most of the people who listen to the show are those people that haven’t got time to read newspapers: taxi drivers, travelling sales reps, that sort of stuff.
Stella: So I started as a coordinator of volunteers for Vision Australia Radio, and four years ago I moved into the communications area, and now I’m client communications. Part of that role is doing a program called Talking Vision, and I also produce a range of podcasts, which I produce through Vision Australia Radio as well. My program Talking Vision is a show that focuses on stories of achievement and inspiration about people who are blind or have low vision. The most popular show though, I do a show every year, I repeat it at Christmas time, it’s the Braille music camp, and it’s for children, and we play a lot of music and there’s a musician and a braille reader who comes on the program, and I speak to three young children who have been to the braille camp, that’s a really popular one.
Harriet: So the Seeing Eye Dogs radio show is basically me interviewing puppy carers, I have members of the vet team staff, and I ask them questions about what they do as a puppy carer or I find out client stories, or I get advice on stuff that interests me. I’m a puppy carer myself, so I get a lot of interesting training advice, asking questions I thought I wanted to know anyway. We have puppy carers who bring their dogs in I think, most of them tend to go over the phone because we have puppy carers in places not in Victoria at all so it kind of makes more sense, but I’ve had a few guests and I’m actually quite happy when they bring a puppy along because it means I get to meet the puppy as well! So I bring my puppy Feather, who is a Seeing Eye Dog puppy in with me, she’s about 12 months old and a black lab female, she comes with me everywhere I go, so of course this is part of the arrangement, and the same if any other puppy carers come in here, and if they’re my guests they’re allowed to bring in their dogs and someone will make sure they have water, and there’s beds and crates if needed, but otherwise she’s pretty happy to just chill out under the recording desk and we hope that whichever puppy is on doesn’t make noises; we had to edit out some scratching where the dog started scratching on its ear or collar. We see the working dogs so it’s kind of a good reminder of what we do.
Glenis Henderson: My name is Glenis Henderson and I’m a reader for Afternoon Live. We basically read articles that are given to us to deliver, and those articles are actually sorted by people prior to our coming in. What I always enjoy in the reading is that you can see there’s a trend that she may pick up on, so she’ll have a particular theme, and various articles will then support each one of those, and that brings together an interesting program. We need to have at least an hour to pre-read our material, so we go through that, mark them up if we need to, that is, put in where we need to take breaths for punctuation and so on, and it helps us to be familiar with what we’re going to read because when we come into this studio we come in to read live. It’s not pre-recorded in any sense, so we’re going straight out into the airwaves. We take it in turns, Joanne does the introduction, hands it over to Nadja, and then I pick it up and then we take it in turns.
Nadja Lobato Mesquito: There’s the welcome, and introduction of people, then a short rundown of what we’re going to present for the next half hour, our film review, book review, theatre, festivals of course, and there’s always so much on, and it’s nice to know that people are listening. Some people actually listen because English is not their first language, so they will tune in to learn something, I hope that happens.
Joanna Jojkity: My name is Joanna Jojkity and I am a presenter for an afternoon program called Afternoon Live. Afternoon Live is more a magazine, lighter type program, as I often say there’s no heavy news, no world catastrophes, no politics, and I try and select articles that perhaps people wouldn’t normally hear in general newspapers. Well I do a lot of what’s on in Melbourne, I do a lot of things that are happening around the state, today our program was focusing on the festivals and things that are happening in Melbourne during March.
Matt: I just felt that Vision Australia was a really good fit for me in terms of an opportunity to bring some of my industry experience to Vision Australia Radio, especially within the sporting industry, like I’ve been involved with sports radio for a very long time, so our show, Vision Sports on a Saturday morning, really tries to capture the week in sport, so we go through the many articles that have been written, just to gather what has happened and transpired throughout the course of the week, and we try to link that also with guests from the sporting world as well, such as Brett Phillips who talks tennis, a number of AFL guests like Brent Harvey the former North Melbourne champion, Scott Lucas, Brian Martin who’s a well respected racing identity, so we’ve been able to tap into so many good people within the world of sport, and talk about a whole range of sports over a two hour time period, and that’s the biggest thing for me that encourages me to keep coming every week, and being as passionate as what I am.
Stephen: One of the things that’s very important is that, in addition to using the radio to read content, like newspapers, books, magazines etc., is the opportunity to provide information to people that just otherwise wouldn’t be available. I co-present a technology program, and would you believe it’s called Talking Tech! I work with the friend of a colleague, David Woodbridge, so he and I have a chat on the radio for 15 minutes every week. We go through the latest developments in access technology, things like features on smart phones that make it easier for people who can’t see the screen, or a new app that might be available that’s of particular interest, or something that’s happening in Windows, maybe in Windows 10 where it’s Screen Reader, which is a software which reads on the screen. It’s called an Orbit Reader, O-R-B-I-T, and what it is really is just sort of like a personal note taker, so it’s a device I use to capture my notes in preparation for the program, and then work from it during the program, so just where I get my little prompts and things from.
Tim: Yeah, I’ve learnt everything. I started off as a technical operator in the radio, so I know all about the panel operation and I do all of the panel operation for my own programs now, so that’s expanded my skill set considerably. I really look forward to being able to share a) the news and b) all of the talents and the short stories and things we come across with our clients. I think it is becoming more accessible. I think with podcasts and streaming you’re getting a lot more people who can listen to radio at any time, and I know several people who, as with TV, very rarely listen to broadcasts as they happen, but catch up with them when it’s convenient for them.
Matt: For me, the most important thing coming to work here at Vision Australia is that it’s a relaxing environment, very friendly, we’re inclusive, we’re understanding of people’s needs, with low vision, but we’re also very respectful to each other, we work hard as a team, when we’re going on and off air we want to put the best quality content together and the content is what we do, and putting out the best production that we know for the two hours, so that is really important, and that’s the best thing about coming to Vision Australia: you know that you’re going to have all those elements, and everyone that we’re working with is reaching for the same goal, and has the same aspirations, so I think that’s a really important part of the fabric of Vision Australia Radio.
Stella: Even if you’re blind or have low vision, or you’ve got dyslexia, or English is your second language and you’re unable to read print, that means you’re denied particular information, and to have access to that information, 1) it can open up a whole new world, 2) it makes you part of a conversation that’s going on as well.
Ian: There’s such a broad range of people here, all different backgrounds, all different ages, and just having a chat with them, so the best time is doing all the prep stuff and all that chatter, that’s where the fun is.
Harriet: Everyone’s really nice, so I’m always pretty enthused and happy and especially when I’ve got a really good guest lined up, which is most weeks, there’s always going to be an exciting conversation happening so I’m happy.
Joanna: Well I enjoy being on the radio and I enjoy putting it together, and make friends, and quite a camaraderie of people that are here, so it’s a very enjoyable experience.
Glenis: I like reading, I’ve always liked reading, and just to be able to do something that I enjoy, and that I trust other people find value in, well it’s good to do. You just feel good about it.
Joanna: It’s a fun thing to do, and it’s good volunteering, and if you’re going to volunteer it’s a really good way to volunteer because we’re going out to the community, we’re helping other people, and we have a very diverse listening group, so it’s a fun way to volunteer.
V: Credits.