Enhancing Accessibility: The Growing Importance of Audio Description in Media (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Audio description, or what is often referred to as video description or described video services, is a narrative description of on-screen actions, visual cues such as characters and costumes, text appearing in graphics in a video, or a video that occurs during breaks in the original audio or video. More so, it's a solution that you can incorporate into your video content to make it more accessible for those who are blind or have low vision. In today's world, as audio description gets more and more popular, it's starting to get incorporated by larger networks every single day. But more importantly, and more recently, the big events that we see that have using audio description are the Oscars, the Grammys, and even the Super Bowl, and they're offering it in a live setting. It's more commonly used in the media world and broadcast TV and film, but every single day we're seeing it more and more incorporated in corporations and educational institutions. When talking about audio description and the stylistic differences, there can sometimes be a few, but the description should always try and match the style of the video, and it should avoid giving a conclusion rather than a time, a true description of what's happening. You know, good descriptions, they enhance, they complement the event, and it should never ever mislead somebody, confuse you, or distract from the actual content that's happening in the video. If a character is happy, that description shouldn't just state, for instance, Nancy looks happy. Instead, it should cover the visual cues that help viewers come to that conclusion, but as well as her appearance, her background, more visual elements that give the full picture of what's being shown, actually. So maybe it's more along the lines of, Nancy is a middle-aged, blonde-haired woman sitting on a bench in a park with her friends smiling and laughing. A quality description should provide audience members with a brief, but a full verbal description to mirror an incredibly similar experience to that of what actually appears on the screen.