Audio Description Service

What is Audio Description (AD)?

Audio description is prepared as an additional audio track to accompany on-screen shows or programmes, or other events.

The audio track contains a narration of what is happening visually.

The audio describers use any gaps in the dialogue to describe what can be seen.

While it is important to provide this information in the same language as the source material, it is equally necessary to prepare audio descriptions in other languages to support access to material that has voiceover of the dialogue in different languages.

Why is audio description (AD) important?

As a demonstration of how important audio description is to the big players like Netflix, this network is adding audio description to its platform as a setting. Netflix says that 40% of its global subscribers regularly use the accessibility features such as subtitles, audio description (AD) and subtitles for the Deaf and hard of hearing (SDH), so it is no wonder that distributors like this are turning their attention to increasing accessibility.

As part of this effort, all eyes are on providing audio description in different languages.

In the UK, Ofcom prepares targets that broadcasters must meet in terms of providing audio description to accompany their material.

In general, a target of a minimum of 10% of the services should have accompanying AD tracks.

A copy of the relevant code can be found here:

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0016/40273/tv-access-services-2015.pdf

Some broadcasters and distributors far exceed the minimum requirements in providing audio description with Sky currently providing AD on 28% of its shows over 32 channels. Four channels in the UK have committed to providing audio description on at least 20% of their material:  Sky (as already mentioned), BBC, ITV and Channel 4.

Who are our audio describers?

Some of our voiceover artists specialise in audio description and prefer this over more traditional voiceover assignments. If you listen to professionally recorded audio description, you will realise that the narrative isn’t a completely “flat” read.

Working in over 200 languages, our talented audio describers find that balance between adopting the right tone but not competing with the acting or voiceover of the actual dialogue. The tone and style will if course depend on the subject matter of the source material.

Our audio describers will often need to demonstrate variety in tone and emotion within one assignment. Perfect delivery and knowing what tone to adopt is all.

Please get in touch with details of your project and we’d be happy to provide demo voice samples for you to choose from.

The audio description will only be as good as the script

As part of the service we offer, our audio description script writers will prepare a narrative that matches the tone of the material while not drawing the audience away from the story.
They must take into account the time available in between dialogue, sometimes a matter of a few seconds, to describe a visual element in such a way that it enhances the experience of the blind or partially sighted audience and allows the audio describer to inject an appropriate tone into what might be just a couple of words.

Our carefully crafted scripts can then be localised into other languages ready for our voiceover talents in the relevant languages to record, and our studio engineers to edit and synch to create separate audio tracks.

Audio description studio editing

We work with partner studios around the world, but we also have our own in-house state-of-art studio with a soundproof recording booth.

Depending on your requirements, high-quality audio descriptions can simply be provided as a WAV or MP3 file.

Just let us know what you need and we’ll do the rest.