Vickie and Jim Kennedy took a photo with Franciscan Sister Alicia Damien Lau, left, and guide dog Buddy during a visit to Kalaupapa. (Courtesy Jim Kennedy)
By Jennifer Rector
Hawaii Catholic Herald
People who are visually impaired have a new way to experience Kalaupapa, the remote peninsula on Molokai where St. Damien, St. Marianne and Servant of God Joseph Dutton ministered to Hansen’s disease patients, thanks to a University of Hawaii at Manoa professor and the National Park Service.
The visually impaired can now picture in great detail the pathways, mountain ridges, buildings and more in Kalaupapa through the UniDescription (UniD) app, which was created by Brett Oppegaard, a professor in audio description at UH-Manoa, in partnership with NPS. (Kalaupapa was established as a national historical park by President Jimmy Carter in 1980.)
Oppegaard and his team have worked for more than 10 years to provide a new lens on national parks across the country for those facing visual challenges.
UniD’s mission is to make NPS park and memorial brochure information more meaningful to those who are blind or visually impaired. It does so by bringing together teams to provide very detailed verbal descriptions of the pictures, maps, artifacts and more that appear in the brochures.
“The words in the brochures have long been available online, but there were no descriptions of the images included until UniD,” said Jim Kennedy, who helped to describe Kalaupapa for UniD and has also described other parks in Hawaii with his wife, Vickie, who is visually impaired.
The teams consist of at least one blind person, a park ranger from the park being described and a couple other sighted individuals.
“As a team, the sighted try to describe the image as best they can, and then the blind person picks it apart. With their probing questions, the descriptions are honed with more detail and help provide much better mental images for the blind,” Jim Kennedy said.
The app describes about 200 national parks, including several in Hawaii, but the UniD developers hope to audio-describe brochures at all 400-plus sites as well as other visual media, such as exhibits and wayside signs.
“Our goal all along has been to ‘audio-describe the world,’ and I think we are doing our part; we just need more people to get invested in making inclusive media and in taking small steps to make all media that gets circulated publicly to have options for people with diverse abilities to gather and process that information,” Oppegaard said.
The Kennedys were the advocates for Kalaupapa being added to the app.
It was as simple as asking Oppegaard if Kalaupapa had been audio-described. He said no, and with enthusiasm Vickie Kennedy said, “I want it!”
“It’s a history that I can relate to,” she said. “Beginning with my going to Sacred Hearts Academy, and as if that was not enough, I taught there (at the academy) for 10 years,” from 1968-77.
Losing vision, not hope
Kennedy was diagnosed in 1978 with retinitis pigmentosa, commonly known as tunnel vision.
This condition robs people of the ability to use their peripheral vision, and eventually patients lose their sight entirely, which happened to Kennedy in 2000.
She was a single mom to her 8-year-old son, George, at the time of her diagnosis.
But losing her sight did not stop her. With faith she jumped into the unknown and kept moving forward with a passion to help others like herself.
“Vickie tirelessly tries to help people cope with going blind,” said Jim Kennedy. “This is because she was so desperate for information when first diagnosed, information that simply was not available, unlike today when we have the internet, support organizations and incredible assistive devices and resources.”
Vickie Kennedy is now a part of several boards including the Hawaii Association of the Blind. Her connections to many visually impaired organizations led her to Oppegaard.
“Blindness is not the end of the world. It’s not a terminal disease. And you know what? Now is the time to be blind. There is so much (technology) out there,” she said jokingly.
Kennedy shared how Father Damien and Mother Marianne have had a hand in her life throughout the years, inspiring her acts of service in the community.
“With my first guide dog and just about three years with my second guide dog, we visited St. Francis Hospice,” Kennedy said.
She and her pups have visited up to 2,500 patients in The Queen’s Medical Center and St. Francis Hospice.
Kennedy also served as the registrar at Damien Memorial School and was the organist for the Cathedral Basilica of Our Lady of Peace in downtown Honolulu — where St. Damien was ordained in 1864 and where she married Jim in 1984.
The Kennedys now live in Ewa Beach and attend St. Augustine by the Sea Church in Waikiki.
Joining the UniD mission
The Kennedys joined the UniDescription mission about eight years ago; their first national park project was the Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C.
“The teams do not need to visit the properties, as their job is to focus on the images included in the park brochure being worked on,” Jim Kennedy said. “In the case of Kalaupapa, we were invited to come over to fine-tune a few of the descriptions we had worked on and finish up the project.
“Of course, we embraced the idea of going back to this sacred place.”
The Kennedys first visited Kalaupapa in 1999. They were on the movie set of “Molokai: The Story of Father Damien,” for which Vickie’s son was a manager. (Her father also played a role in the film as a patient.)
Many years later the Kennedys were brought back to the settlement in Molokai for a different mission.
“All of this is just interwoven,” Vickie Kennedy said.
In August, they worked with an NPS official at Kalaupapa and her assistant to validate all the image descriptions they worked on months prior.
“They took us from place to place that we had spent weeks and months earlier trying to describe based on a little 2-inch-by-1-inch picture in the brochure,” Jim Kennedy said.
It took about seven months to complete the image descriptions.
“A person looks at the brochure. You see all the words written about the park, see all the pictures of that park but then what happens to the person who’s blind or visually impaired?” Vickie Kennedy said.
She shared the impact of what audio description can do for someone who is visually impaired. A sighted person might just see a simple image, but for someone like her, audio description brings the park to life.
“Whether you’re able to see or not, especially the person who has seen when you describe something, I picture in my mind’s eye what it will look like. And until I have it, I will say, well, what about this? What about that? So, the blind is the one who will poke holes,” Vickie Kennedy said.
The Kennedys have devoted about eight years working with UniD, also helping to describe Pearl Harbor and Ala Kahakai National Historic Trail on Hawaii Island. In February they will tackle their next national park — Grand Teton in Wyoming.
UniD is available in Apple and Google app stores. For more information, visit https://unidescription.org.
