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Arts and Visually Impaired Audiences (AVIA)

Arts and Visually Impaired Audiences (AVIA) is a nonprofit, tax-exempt corporation formed in 1991 by Jesse Minkert to create, operate, and promote projects that make the arts in the State of Washington more accessible to people with visual impairments.

Arts and Visually Impaired Audiences’ mission is to serve the blind and visually impaired residents of Washington state with access to arts events and to provide hands-on creative opportunities in an accessible environment. AVIA provides training, access services, and programs that involve visually impaired people in both creating and experiencing art. AVIA is committed to providing access to the arts for blind and visually impaired members of racial and ethnic minorities, including but not limited to Asian, Black, Hispanic/Latino, and immigrant communities.

Blind and visually impaired individuals often have limited opportunities for arts participation. To help fill this need, AVIA provides live and recorded gallery and performance descriptions, accessible hands-on workshops, and other access services necessary for visually impaired individuals to actively engage in art. AVIA partners with artists and arts organizations to help them make art more accessible.

AVIA pursues this mission by:

Providing Audio-Description for live performances.
Promoting Audio-Description as an effective and appropriate method of providing accessibility to theatre performances for persons with visual impairments.
Providing other appropriate access services to the arts for blind and visually impaired people.
Involving visually impaired people in the creation of art.
Informing visually impaired people of the availability of access to the arts.

One of AVIA’s first projects to increase awareness of arts access was the Access Arts Line, a voicemail telephone service providing monthly notices of arts events accessible to visually impaired people. AVIA has provided over 600 descriptions through its Audio Description Service in Seattle theaters such as the Seattle Repertory Theatre, Intiman, ACT Theatre, The Paramount Theatre, The Fifth Avenue Theatre, The Bathhouse Theatre, The Seattle Children’s Theatre, and for the Pacific Northwest Ballet. AVIA also provided live and recorded descriptions for museums and galleries including special national exhibits including the Treasures of Tutankhamun and the Alexander Calder exhibits at the Seattle Art Museum, and tours of the Seattle Sculpture Park.

In 1995 AVIA launched “The Package,” a group of services intended to lower barriers to the theater for visually impaired people. “The Package” provided subscribers with discounted tickets, sighted guides and door to door transportation to and from the Theater.

In 1997, AVIA, in collaboration with Jack Straw Cultural Center, offered the first Blind Youth Audio Project, which teaches creative digital audio production techniques to blind and visually impaired high school students from around Washington State. This program, which helps students create radio theater and music projects in professional audio studios, has continued annually ever since. In 2014 AVIA and Jack Straw began a new, ongoing series of accessible workshops for blind and visually impaired students and their sighted friends and family at Jack Straw in conjunction with the Jack Straw New Media Gallery program. In 2024, AVIA and Jack Straw began a new poetry and sound program at Hazelwood Elementary School with blind and visually impaired students in Edmonds, WA. During the spring of 2026, we piloted a new program for blind and visually impaired high school students in Snohomish County working with the Snohomish County School District.