Adding Audio Description: Does it Make a Difference?

Abstract

A television viewing experiment-preceded and followed by interviews about attitudes, usual television viewing patterns and demographics-was conducted with 111 legally blind adults who were convened in groups. The research examined the impact of watching television science programs with and without audio description. The experiment showed that respondents gained and retained more information from watching programs with description. Respondents reported that description makes programs more enjoyable, interesting, and informative; and that they are more comfortable talking with sighted people about programs that had been described. The positive impact of added description was greater for the program with less narration in its original format.Television programs and videos are increasingly important for education and popular culture; they are widely discussed at work, in school, and among friends and neighbors. People who are visually impaired (those who are blind or have low vision) watch television at about the same rate as does the general public (Packer & Kirchner, 1997). However, because much of the content is presented only visually, they have limited access to the programs. Access is increased through audio description, which adds precise, concise verbal descriptions of The research reported here was conducted under a subcontract to the American Foundation for the Blind from the WGBH Educational Foundation; National Science Foundation Grant ESI-9253447. Edward Cutler guided our selection of science-relevant questions.

Odd Job Jack described: a universal design approach to described video

“…While there were positive opinions comments regarding the quality of the conventional version for all clips (similar to results found in studies by [13,14]), particularly for clip 2, no conventional version of any clip had more positive opinion comments than the first person narrative version. This may be due to the fact that people were familiar and satisfied with the conventional type of DVI and did not think it was necessary to contribute positive comments.…”

“…There have been relatively few studies [13,14] that have investigated the impact of DVI on people who are blind. Most of these studies compared participant performance on a multiple choice test and attitudes between content containing description and content without it.…”

In-situ study of blind individuals listening to audio-visual contents

“…He found that the observable degree of regularity of words in the VD corpus might facilitate the automatic production of VD. Peli [25], Pettit [26], Schmeidler [27] and Ely [28] reported on evaluations done by the VII on the value and importance of VD.…”

“Feeling” audio description

“…Pettitt et al 1996;Peli et al 1996;Schmeidler and Kirchner 2001;Luque 2009). From this point of view, the audience's response -both cognitive and emotional -becomes, together with the professionals' ethical choices, the keystones for establishing solid theoretical postulates and efficient working guidelines.…”