Corinne Van Dusen, who reads the news to people with visual disabilities for Accessible Media Inc., sits next to her recording equipment in Toronto, on Dec. 15.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
Despite rising for work every weekday at 4:30 a.m., hours before the first rays of sunlight crack through her living-room window, Corinne Van Dusen refuses to drink coffee.
Instead, her wake-up routine involves pacing the apartment and boiling a nice, strong cup of water.
“Coffee or tea dry my mouth out,” she says. “Hot water is just … water.”
As one of two hosts for Accessible Media Inc.’s flagship cable and online news-reading show, Ms. Van Dusen is unusually attuned to the persnickety mechanics of speech, those pesky plosives and furtive fricatives.
Airing weekdays at 8 a.m., her program comes with a twist: Channel surfers may be surprised to find it amounts to an hour-long black screen.
Most of us take for granted that we can simply pick up the newspaper and start reading. But for the roughly 3 per cent of people in Canada who are blind or partially sighted, news-reading shows offer a way to catch up on the day’s major headlines without having to navigate an assistive device or commit to the fast-paced delivery of radio and broadcast news.
In Ms. Van Dusen’s case, the stories all come from one place: the pages of The Globe and Mail.
AMI’s reading shows began in 1990 under VoicePrint, a television channel for people who are blind or partially sighted. By 2012, it had evolved into AMI-audio.
“They had readers come in and quite literally read the newspaper,” says Mike Ross, Ms. Van Dusen’s reading partner on The Globe and Mail Today. (Gifted with a smooth voice, he also serves as the Toronto Maple Leafs’ PA announcer.) “Sometimes they’d read grocery flyers. It was just literally relaying published information to the audience that they could not read, that was not available in Braille.”
The Globe and Mail Today may not do Breakfast Television numbers, but it’s successful nonetheless. Andy Frank, manager of AMI-audio, says it has a dedicated daily audience in the low thousands, and that the channel is one of the world’s largest broadcast reading services.
In part, that’s down to the warmth that emanates from the hosts’ mellifluous readings. “It’s a human voice,” Ms. Van Dusen says. “It’s like – in the morning, someone’s reading to you.”
Mike Ross in his intimate home studio in Ajax, Ont. on Dec. 22. Here he records for an array of sectors of the industry, including for The Globe and Mail, as well as voice acting and audition videos for TV segments.Shay Conroy/The Globe and Mail
With his Leafs gig, there’s an “expectation of near-perfection,” Mr. Ross explains. But in news-reading, there are humanizing moments – hiccups, pauses, the rare trip-up – that just don’t exist with text-to-speech or artificial-intelligence software. (Not yet, anyway. AMI, for its part, doesn’t use AI for any of its reading programs.)
The show comes together quickly. Ms. Van Dusen spends half an hour every morning picking from The Globe’s top stories, many of which go live between 4 a.m. and 6 a.m. Mr. Ross prefers to select his the night before, so he often gets first crack at the opinion pieces. “That’s just my competitive nature,” he jokes.
Episodes run on a 7,800-word budget for the hour, working out to nine stories total. Full read-throughs, before edits, take roughly 80 minutes. The show used to be live, but these days it’s “live-to-tape,” meaning it’s produced live, lightly edited, then aired shortly afterward.
Since the pandemic began, they’ve both recorded from home – Mr. Ross in Ajax, Ont., and Ms. Van Dusen in Toronto. “We call it Studio D, for studio dining room table,” she says. Her in-person audience amounts to a sleeping husband and dog in the nearby bedroom. In Mr. Ross’s case, it’s his wife and two cats.
It helps that their reading styles are different. Mr. Ross’s is laid-back, owing to his sports background, Ms. Van Dusen says. “I come from traffic and news, so I’ve had to work a lot to emote instead of just reading.”
Once the day’s show is planned out, the hosts get to work marking up the stories. Names and unusual words get a pronunciation check; pauses for breathing get noted; the text gets tweaked for readability.
A recent example: an opinion piece describing something as Job-like, in the Old Testament sense. Mr. Ross added an “e” – “Jobe.”
“At 6:30 in the morning, when you’re reading someone else’s words and you’re doing it cold, you’re gonna say ‘job,’ ” he says. “I promise you, you’re gonna say ‘job,’ not ‘Job.’ ”
Both have words that trip them up every time. “Infrastructure,” for Ms. Van Dusen.
Mr. Ross, however, is hesitant to share his. “I’m gonna say the word, and that means that at some point in the next three or four days, I’m gonna run into it.”
His word: “Epitome,” pronounced “eh-PIH-to-mee.” Mr. Ross once had to read it live, on NHL Network Radio – and he froze. “In that live moment, with a hot mic in front of me, I had no idea what this word is,” he recalls.
He went with “eh-pi-TOAM.” A colleague teases him about it to this day.
After years of reading pieces in The Globe, the pair have favourite writers. For Ms. Van Dusen, it’s film critic Barry Hertz. “I love the way he writes.” She has a soft spot for the Fast and the Furious franchise, just as the writer does. “I knew we were kindred, parasocial friends,” she says with a laugh.
For Mr. Ross, it’s sports columnist Cathal Kelly, whose name he pronounces with an emphatic Irish lilt: “cuh-HALL.”
“There’s a little bit of cynicism there with Cathal that sort of fits me to a T.”
Both Ms. Van Dusen and Mr. Ross are near-evangelical about their work, niche as it may be.
“I’ve never done any broadcasting that has felt more fulfilling than what I do at AMI,” Mr. Ross says. “I’m just a liaison. I’m reading what you might not be able to read, or may choose not to read. Maybe you enjoy the audio experience. I’m no better than anybody else. I just have a talent with my voice.
“As my wife tells me: ‘For whatever reason, people don’t mind listening to you.’ ”