The Woman in the Booth Who Edits Reality for a Living

Vivian Sotto is a fictional audio describer. Her craft is not.

Software agents now routinely act as someone's only interpreter of a complex environment, browsing and reading and deciding what matters on screens their users never see. The enterprise world is building this mediation layer at scale. Mostly it talks about accuracy, latency, task completion.

But a craft tradition has been navigating exactly this problem for decades, in the dark, one performance at a time. Live theater audio describers sit in a booth at the back of the house and narrate the visual elements of a production into a microphone, for listeners who are blind or have low vision, fitting their words into the silences between actors' lines.¹ For stretches of any given performance, they are the only contact their listeners have with what is happening on stage.²

Vivian Sotto has been doing this work in the Twin Cities for fourteen years. A former stage manager who developed a progressive eye condition in her early forties (she retains limited peripheral vision), she came to description from the other side of the curtain. We spoke in a coffee shop near the Guthrie, where she'd just finished a prep session for an upcoming production. Her three-ring binder of description scripts sat on the table between us like a prop from a play about bureaucracy.

You've described hundreds of performances. What does the actual moment feel like, sitting in the booth, mic live?

Vivian: Like being a very calm person having a very quiet emergency. You've rehearsed. You've watched the show twice, maybe three times. You've written your script, timed every gap between lines.³ And then the lights go down and it's live and the actor does something slightly different with their hands and you have about a second and a half to decide: does that matter? Is that the thing that makes the next scene land?

Most of the time, honestly, it's fine. The script holds. But there's always a moment, every single performance, where the script meets the actual live thing and they don't quite match, and you're just... choosing. In real time. For someone who can't check your work.

How do you decide what to describe and what to leave out?

Vivian: There's a professional standard: describe what conveys meaning.⁴ Which sounds clear until you're watching a scene where a woman is holding a letter and also standing near a window and also wearing a coat she wasn't wearing before, and you have maybe four seconds of silence to work with. You can't say all three. You probably can't say two. So you pick the one you think carries the story forward.

The professional guidelines emphasize objectivity, "describe only what you see."⁵ Do you believe that's achievable?

Vivian: [laughs] I believe it's useful. It's a discipline. It keeps you honest. Instead of saying someone looks "desperate," you say she looked at him and kept looking.⁶ That's better. That gives the listener room to decide what the looking means.

But the decision to describe the looking instead of, say, the way she's gripping the chair? That's already interpretation. I've decided the looking is the important thing. Maybe it is. Probably it is. But I chose it, and the choice is invisible to the person hearing it.

The honest version is that I aspire to objectivity the way a journalist aspires to it. A standard that makes the work better without ever being fully achieved.

You mentioned the touch tour earlier, before we started recording. Can you explain what that is?

Vivian: Oh, it's my favorite part. Before the described performance, listeners come to the stage and touch things. The set, the props, the costumes. Actors come out and describe themselves. "I'm five-four, I have red hair, my shoes click."⁷ A bit of dialogue so you can match voices to characters.

You're front-loading context because the live description is too compressed to carry everything.⁸ You can't stop mid-show to explain what the set looks like. So you do it before. It's like reading the footnotes before the essay. Which, now that I say it out loud, sounds like something only I would enjoy.

Has anything gone wrong during a live performance that changed how you think about the work?

Vivian: A prop fell once. Loud bang. Not in the script. The audience gasped. And I had maybe two seconds to decide: do I describe the prop falling, or do I describe the actor's recovery? Because I can't do both. I went with the recovery. "She picks up the candlestick without breaking character." I thought that was the more interesting information. But someone else might have described the fall. And their listener would have had a different experience of that moment. A different show, almost.

That's when it really crystallized. Not just that I'm choosing, but that my choices are the show, for the people listening to me.

Does that weight ever become too much?

Vivian: Yes. No. It's complicated. The listeners come up afterward and say things like "I felt like I was part of the show."⁹ And that's real. That's not because I was perfect. It's because I was there. A lot of theaters still don't offer description at all, and the pandemic made it worse. Describers left the field and haven't come back.¹⁰

So the weight is real, but the alternative is absence. No one in the booth. No voice in the earpiece. Just music and dialogue and long stretches of silence where you know something is happening but you don't know what.

I'll take the weight.

You're three layers of interpretation deep. Playwright to director to you. Does that ever feel like a game of telephone?

Vivian: More like a game of telephone where the last person in line knows they're the last person in line and cares enormously about getting it right. Which doesn't mean they do. It means they carry the doubt.

What kind of doubt?

Vivian: The productive kind, I hope. After every show I go through my script and mark the moments where I hesitated. Where I almost said something different. Where I wonder if the word I chose, "slowly" instead of "carefully," "steps back" instead of "retreats," nudged the listener toward one reading when another was equally valid.

Nobody asks me to do this. The listener will never know.

That's a high standard for something most people don't even know exists.

Vivian: Well, most people don't need it. That's the thing about mediation. If you're not the one relying on it, it's invisible. And maybe it should be. The best description disappears into the show. You don't notice the voice; you notice the play.

But someone should be paying attention to what it means to be the voice. Because that job is getting handed out to a lot of new workers lately, and not all of them have three-ring binders.

Vivian Sotto's description scripts are, of course, not available for review, because she is not real. But every craft detail, professional tension, and impossible aspiration in this conversation is drawn from the documented practice of live theater audio description, a field that has been quietly working through questions about mediation, objectivity, and compelled trust that the rest of the technology world is only now beginning to ask.

Footnotes

1. Perkins School for the Blind, Making Theatre Accessible: A Guide to Audio Description. https://www.perkins.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/ad-guide.doc ↩

2. American Council of the Blind, "Audio Description At Every Performance." https://www.acb.org/audio-description-every-performance ↩

3. Wisniewski, Mary. "The Audio Describer: Bringing Live Theater to Those with Vision Problems." Newcity Stage, October 26, 2022. https://www.newcitystage.com/2022/10/26/the-audio-describer-bringing-live-theater-to-those-with-vision-problems/ ↩

4. Audio Description Coalition, Standards for Audio Description and Code of Professional Conduct. https://audiodescriptionsolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/adc_standards_090615.pdf ↩

5. American Audio Description Coalition maxim, cited in "Beyond Objectivity in Audio Description: New Practices and Perspectives." https://www.researchgate.net/publication/376918219 ↩

6. Perkins School for the Blind, Making Theatre Accessible. https://www.perkins.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/ad-guide.doc ↩

7. Veroniiiica, "Promoting Cast Involvement in Audio Description." https://veroniiiica.com/promoting-cast-involvement-in-audio-description/ ↩

8. The Lowry, "What are Audio Described Performances?" https://help.thelowry.com/support/solutions/articles/203000035935 ↩

9. Wisniewski, Newcity Stage, 2022. ↩

10. "How Audio Description Sets the Stage for More Accessible Theater." Reasons to be Cheerful. https://reasonstobecheerful.world/gravity-access-audio-descriptions-performing-arts/ ↩