Audio Description – Five Top Tips

Video content is becoming increasingly accessible for all audiences. Closed captions were designed for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, and in recent years, audio description is being utilised more widely to ensure accessibility for blind and visually impaired audiences. For Deaf and Hard of Hearing viewers, closed captions and subtitles are a legal requirement for broadcast and streaming services, and are available for most online content. In contrast, audio descriptions are frequently not available for videos, but availability is quickly improving.

Capital Captions provide audio description services with a number of different options. We work with a range of different voice artists and work with script writing, sound optimisation and video editing to ensure the best quality audio descriptions.

In today’s blog, we’re looking at Audio Description – Five Top Tips to give you our top tips to ensure the best audio descriptions possible.

1. Write audio descriptions in an appropriate style.

The writing style of a visual narrative script should match the overall tone of the video, whilst keeping the audience in mind. For children’s content, words should be used that children will understand. For suspenseful videos, descriptive words and tone should reflect the tone of a video. Names of speakers should also be included where possible.

2. Consider style and tone when recording voiceovers.

Much like writing style, the recording style and tone of the voice artist should also match the tone of the target audience. Male oriented videos with predominantly males onscreen should have a male narrator and female oriented videos should have a female voice artist. This isn’t a hard and fast rule, but can help to ensure the tone of audio description is in sync with the video content. Children’s content should always be spoken with a child friendly tone.

3. Write accurately and be succinct.

When audio describing, timing is key and the visual narrative should never overlap dialogue. For this reason, it’s often a requirement to have short, snappy descriptions that sum up the important parts of the visual information. Audio description writers should never over-describe. If they do, a voice artist can end up either overlapping with dialogue, having to speak at an unreasonable speed, leaving speech indecipherable. A good audio description writer should know what needs to be audio described, (i.e. visual descriptions only, not sound effects) and they should be practised in describing concisely and accurately.

4. Clean up and optimise sound prior to exporting your AD.

Optimising sound quality is a hugely important part of voice work. Good sound editing is often the difference between professional and amateur audio description services. Be sure to remove echoes, DeEss where appropriate, and add audio filters to ensure there is no background noise. In addition, where audio descriptions are tight and/or don’t fit within dialogue, avoid speeding up the sound too much and instead, be willing to re-record as required.

5. Consider video output and editing.

There are few options when it comes to audio descriptions. The standard and usually preferred option is to audio describe in between dialogue and export as a WAV or MP3 file. This audio file can then be turned on and off as your video plays (similar to closed captions). It means that there is effectively one video file and one audio file which can be overlayed as required.

The second option is to edit your video to make room for audio description. The option of a dedicated video means pausing and/or extending the video content to allow time for visual narrative description. This approach removes the element of time constraints when it comes to how much can be described. It effectively means there will be two versions of your video; one intended for viewing audiences and the other for the visually impaired. Audio description in this case cannot be turned on and off. Instead, the viewer chooses which video to watch.

So there you have it, we hope you enjoyed this article on Audio Description – Five Top Tips. Five quick and easy tips to implement in your audio descriptions. If you have a video which is intended for blind or visually impaired audiences or want to make your video as accessible to as wide an audience as you can, then why not get in touch with us today and see what we can offer you.