Inside the fight to make Audio Descrip­tion a non-nego­tiable part of the film industry

Roy Samuel­son has per­formed Audio Descrip­tion for thou­sands of movies and tele­vi­sion shows through­out his career, and like any voice actor, he has added his cred­its to enter­tain­ment data­bas­es over the last few years to high­light his work. But when the head of a facil­i­ty tried to open a link to these cred­its, they found that all had been tak­en down. Samuel­son reached out to the data­base, whose rep­re­sen­ta­tives respond­ed that they took down his name because he did not appear in the cred­its on the screen. Samuel­son apt­ly argued that he was read­ing the visu­al cred­its him­self – a sit­u­a­tion not uncom­mon for Audio Descrip­tion (AD) per­form­ers in film and television.

In an indus­try where peo­ple with var­i­ous skills work on the same film (from hair to cloth­ing to sound design), most film work­ers and audi­ence mem­bers for­get about Audio Descrip­tion pro­fes­sion­als – the peo­ple who trans­late visu­al media into spo­ken word for visu­al­ly impaired view­ers. The skill and cre­ativ­i­ty involved in relat­ing visu­al media is itself a form of art, and in the last decade, Audio Descrip­tion and AD pro­fes­sion­als have increas­ing­ly received recog­ni­tion. At the same time, low vision and blind audi­ences and film work­ers are ques­tion­ing when Audio Descrip­tion pro­fes­sion­als are brought into the process. It’s a field active­ly nav­i­gat­ing the pol­i­tics of who decides what con­tent gets trans­lat­ed and into whose voices.

Feel­ing frus­trat­ed, Samuel­son took mat­ters into his own hands, head­ing to a cof­fee shop to start devel­op­ing a data­base of Audio Descrip­tion cred­its — what we now know as the Audio Descrip­tion Net­work Alliance (ADNA). Ini­tial­ly, he reached out to oth­er pro­fes­sion­als in the voice-over com­mu­ni­ty to con­tribute their cred­its but soon expand­ed it to include writ­ers, con­tent review­ers, con­sul­tants, pro­duc­ers, direc­tors, and any­one else involved in the Audio Descrip­tion process. ​“The idea is for peo­ple to find their favorite per­former or writer and dis­cov­er what projects they’ve worked on, and vice ver­sa,” Samuel­son explained.

View­ers, or more broad­ly end users of video con­tent, became more aware of Audio Descrip­tion after the start of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic. In 2024, the US Depart­ment of Jus­tice announced addi­tion­al laws to ensure that com­pa­nies and online con­tent pro­duc­ers pro­vide Audio Descrip­tion. In the UK, OFCOM’s Access Ser­vices Code has required broad­cast­ers to pro­vide audio descrip­tion for at least 10% of their con­tent since 1996; the BBC raised their in-house require­ment to 20% in 2000 but they often well exceed this tar­get, and the 2024 Media Act now requires that stream­ing plat­forms pro­vide audio descrip­tion for 10% of their pro­grams. As peo­ple dove into stream­ing ser­vices, these ser­vices faced mount­ing pres­sure for their con­tent to be in com­pli­ance with acces­si­bil­i­ty laws.

With this grow­ing need, dis­trib­u­tors and end users looked for train­ing but most Audio Descrip­tion pro­fes­sion­als worked inde­pen­dent­ly and had dif­fer­ent, often hodge­podge train­ing expe­ri­ences. This is where Audio Descrip­tion writ­ers like Colleen Con­nor stepped in. In 2015, Con­nor met with Jan Vul­gar­op­u­los, an audio describer who worked with Arts Access in North Car­oli­na, rec­og­nized a need for more immer­sive, prac­tice-based train­ing in the field and co-found­ed Audio Descrip­tion Train­ing Retreats (ADTR). They ini­tial­ly offered small group, live-in train­ing nature retreats pro­vid­ing immer­sive and prac­tice-heavy expe­ri­ence with a blind and sight­ed instruc­tor for the trainees. They have since evolved into vir­tu­al retreats from 2020 onwards, con­tin­u­ing their com­mit­ment to thor­ough prac­tice and fos­ter­ing inclusion.

Above: A por­trait of most of the ADTR train­ing team at a Con­fer­ence in Seat­tle. Direc­tor Colleen Con­nor is stand­ing cen­ter hold­ing her gold­en lab See­ing Eye Dog Joplin. Roy Samuel­son is tall, with swoopy hair and a salti­er-than-pep­pery scruffy beard, and Colleen is short­er and pale with a pink pix­ie haircut.

Feli­cia Teter, a Black and Indige­nous queer audio describer orig­i­nal­ly from the Yaka­ma Nation, honed their craft at the Black­Star Film Festival’s Audio Descrip­tion for Film Train­ing. ​“Now there’s Audio Descrip­tion cast­ing,” Con­nor explained, ​“which is mak­ing sure you’re match­ing the right life expe­ri­ence and voice and eth­nic­i­ty with the piece, and again, mar­ry­ing that into it and hav­ing peo­ple be a lit­tle more sen­si­tive to the tone of what’s going on than just sort of a very neu­tral read.” Teter works in this space; they actu­al­ly first learned about Audio Descrip­tion from the Black­Star Film Fes­ti­val and now works as a free­lance Audio Describer for Descrip­tive Video Works, in addi­tion to describ­ing the­ater and live events. The fes­ti­val host­ed a two-day, paid train­ing for Black, Indige­nous, and Brown folx to learn Audio Descrip­tion led by audio describer Nicole Sardella.

“Hav­ing peo­ple with­in com­mu­ni­ties audio describe our own art and our own cre­ation is nec­es­sary,” Teter con­tin­ued, ​“so that oth­er peo­ple in our com­mu­ni­ties under­stand our art and our cre­ation because if oth­er peo­ple out­side of our com­mu­ni­ties are describ­ing it, they’re going to give a flat description.”

Cul­tur­al com­pe­ten­cy is impor­tant because Audio Descrip­tion is increas­ing­ly being blend­ed into film pro­duc­tion. Samuelson’s sit­u­a­tion often aris­es because Audio Descrip­tion pro­fes­sion­als cre­ate con­tent ​“post-post-post pro­duc­tion,” Samuel­son explains. He and oth­ers are hired by film dis­trib­u­tors and stream­ing ser­vices to cre­ate Audio Descrip­tions entire­ly sep­a­rat­ed from the pro­duc­tion. But some pro­duc­tions, espe­cial­ly inde­pen­dent films, are push­ing towards acces­si­ble film­mak­ing or inte­grat­ed access in which Audio Descrip­tion is dis­cussed at every step: scriptwrit­ing, direc­tion, edit­ing, and dis­tri­b­u­tion. ​“There’s been a move­ment to have the Audio Descrip­tion track to be a lit­tle more blend­ed into also the emo­tion of what’s going on,” Con­nor explained.

The most recent exam­ple is Nao­mi Kawase’s Radi­ance. In an inter­view with Alek­san­dra Glos and Felipe Toro Fran­co, Kawase shared that she first worked with an Audio Descrip­tion pro­fes­sion­al while work­ing on her film Sweet Bean; the Japan­ese gov­ern­ment was sub­si­diz­ing projects focused on film acces­si­bil­i­ty for blind or low-vision and deaf or hard-of-hear­ing indi­vid­u­als. In Radi­ance, Kawase active­ly incor­po­rat­ed feed­back from the audio descrip­tion pro­fes­sion­al when cre­at­ing lines, includ­ing pac­ing and breaks in dia­logue for con­tent. The Audio Descrip­tion com­pa­ny Pal­abra Inc. worked col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly with blind indi­vid­u­als who assessed the Audio Descrip­tion con­tent. Radi­ance also fea­tured Masako-san, a blind woman, who plays her­self in the film.

Her work close­ly mir­rors Netflix’s pro­duc­tion of All the Light We Can­not See. Pro­duc­ers cast actors Aria Maria Lober­ti and Nell Sut­ton who are blind and low vision to play the blind pro­tag­o­nist Marie-Lau­re LeBlanc and Joe Strechay, a blind acces­si­bil­i­ty con­sul­tant, served as the show’s asso­ciate pro­duc­er. Not only did Strechay work with cast­ing to ensure the process and pro­duc­tion sets were acces­si­ble to blind and low-vision actors, but Strechay’s direc­tion also informed Netflix’s Audio Description.

ADTR grad and IDC Head Writer Liz Gut­man wrote the Audio Descrip­tion and argued for an audio intro­duc­tion by the main actress. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, star Aria Mia Loberti’s audio intro­duc­tion is not on the Net­flix plat­form, but is avail­able on the Net­flix web­site. Vul­gar­op­u­los and Con­nor have advo­cat­ed for adding pre-show notes to screen con­tent for years – pre-show notes have been a com­mon fea­ture of Audio Descrip­tion for the­ater pro­duc­tions. Strechay’s work mir­rors Kawase’s major take­away – that Audio Descrip­tion should be incor­po­rat­ed into the ear­ly ages of film pro­duc­tion to inform how Audio Descrip­tion and spo­ken lines blend well togeth­er and some­times become one.

Incor­po­rat­ing Audio Descrip­tion, Audio Descrip­tion pro­fes­sion­als, and blind and low vision con­sul­tants into the ear­ly stages of pro­duc­tion has even led to a grow­ing new lit­er­ary-cin­e­mat­ic genre. As Audio Descrip­tion blends into spo­ken word and nar­ra­tion, Audio Descrip­tion is becom­ing its own form of art, and as Glos and Fran­co argue, its own form of cin­e­mat­ic poet­ry. What details to include, what words are cho­sen, who says them, and how they say them are all deeply artis­tic, and polit­i­cal­ly charged deci­sions that inform how the future of film will be heard, and who will receive cred­it for count­less hours of work behind the scenes.