Audio Description Services for Accessible Videos
In a survey, the National Health Interview Survey came to know that about 10% of the American population, which is around 23.7 million people, have trouble seeing. Adults in The United States spends more than 11 hours a day being in touch with media devices. They spend approximately 6 hours watching videos.
According to another research, by the end of 2019, 80% of the world’s internet traffic will be for videos alone. We should also focus on the fact that it’s not that the video consumption is increasing rapidly, but the people are also aging. With the increase in age of the population, issues like vision loss and related health problems are also increasing.
20% of the population of America will be more than the age of 65 by the end of 2030. The risk of low vision and blindness increases with aging and spending too much time watching videos can lead to huge implications for increase of vision loss in the next few years.
What is Audio Description?
Audio Description service is for people with low vision or who are blind. This service allows them to access different videos, events, books, or other performances in narrative form. Get your free quote today by calling 1-800-230-7918. Audio description service is a key for revealing the whole video or any other event, in detail for the blind and low vision viewers. The information is narrated in depth, so that they don’t miss out on anything that their seeing counterparts are consuming.
Audio description services provides narration to almost any sort of visual content, which is considered to be important for the understanding of the program. Audio description, can be a live narration or a recorded audio track, narrating the important and relevant visual information in media.
In audio description, it is assumed that the viewer is blind and accordingly they depict all the key elements that are required to understand the content by the blinds or low vision people.
There are two types of Audio Description –
Standard Audio Description
This is a service where the description is kept concise to fit into some allotted time and narrates the interspersed within natural pauses in dialogues of original content.
A video’s audio track can be described in a natural or existing way through a standard audio description. As compared to extended audio, there will be no changes in the source media when a standard description is used.
Only the description snippets are added in its existing place. Standard descriptions are useful when there are lengthy pauses.
Extended Audio Description
Extended audio description is not bounded by the natural pauses in a video, instead it allows you to pause original source content so that you can make space for the extended description, as and when needed.
Extended audio is useful for providing visual information when there are no or minimum count of natural pauses in a video. In short, extended audio has to be preferred specific to cases where there are major key elements to be described in a video. This is said to increase the total length of the source video.
Extended audio gives space to descriptions conveniently and helps the visually impaired individuals a better comprehension of the video’s context. The extended audio description prefers additional video with its descriptions, along with the original video (undescribed). A plugin for descriptions makes users choose between the extended audio or the undescribed one.
Audio Describing Videos in Terms of Style and Delivery
Be it an extended audio description or a standard audio description - A proper and correct audio description will clarify speakers, deliver every context appropriately and articulate all the visual elements in it perfectly. This is critical to obtain a comprehensive result of the video file.
There are certain values to consider while audio describing a video. Some of the common and mandatory points to include in the audio description includes the following:
- ● Being sensitive to a scene’s mood is essential. Sounding confident, warm, interested, or authoritative must be coherent with the video.
- ● Voicing out with your microphone is much required. Avoid sudden changes in the volume and position of the microphone while describing.
- ● It is an important rule that describing a video in the present tense.
- ● A description should be given only for that person sees and not what they assume or feel about the video’s content.
Descriptive Audio Service For Improved Web Accessibility
One of the greatest challenges for the media industry is to enhance their visibility across the world, irrespective of the language, region, individual disabilities, etc. This is possible only with the help of media accessibility services. Imagine a visually impaired person watching a TV show. It would be really challenging to digest the entire information only with the help of the audio. The person is likely to miss a huge amount of crucial details that are conveyed through actions, gestures, and screen/background info. Here comes in the role of audio description services!
Audio description is the verbal narration of the key visual elements of a video that cannot be comprehended from the main audio track. Commonly referred to as ‘video description’ and ‘descriptive narration’, it is inserted in the existing gaps in the dialogue. If you are in search for audio description companies, then you are in the right platform! Gain more insights about our premium audio description services now.
Who Are Benefited From Descriptive Audio Services?
Having stated the primary aim of audio description, let’s take a look at the different areas of application. We provide audio description for visually impaired group of individuals and also media companies to make their videos fully compliant to the accessibility law. In addition, we also offer:
- ● Audio description for institutes
- ● Audio description for blind school
- ● Audio description for eLearning
- ● Audio description for universities
Looking For The Best Audio Description Services?
Whether you need English audio description service or Arabic audio description service, it is always ideal to get the assistance from a professional company. Wondering how to find one. You can avail the services by sitting in the comforts of your home. All you will need is an internet connection and device to browse. Search for the keyword, ‘best audio description services near me’ and you will definitely find Quick Transcription Service at the top of your search engine results page (SERP). You can easily access our webpage and choose the type of service that you are interested in. Our 24/7 customer support team can guide you through the entire process. Moving on to the audio description rates, our company can be highly trusted as we maintain transparency throughout the transaction. You can avail the best video description services at reasonable rates without compromising on the quality.
Audio Description Standards
The quality of an audio description can vary largely depending upon who has produced it and how they have produced it. Described and Captioned Media Program (DCMP) provides their description key, which is considered as the ultimate comprehensive guideline for how to describe. The DCMP’s audio description standards need to be followed in order to create a good quality description.
We, at Quick Transcription Services, follow DCMP description keys to make high quality audio descriptions for our customers. Only a great quality audio description can help the low vision and blind people to understand the content in a better way.
Audio Description Formats
The traditional way of publishing audio description is not supported by many audio/ video players and also by many platforms. To make things easier for our customers, we support a wide range of different downloadable formats. The formats are widely divided into two categories –
1. Text Based – This includes the audio description being done in textual format. We support following downloadable file formats for that –
- ● WebVTT
- ● TXT
- ● DOC
- ● Merged DOC
- ● Stamped DOC
- ● Merged DOC (Stamped)
2. Media Based – Media based audio description format has two subcategories.
2.1. Audio Description Only – In this file includes audio description only and doesn’t include the source audio. The formats you can download are – MP3, OGG and WAV.
2.2. Mixed Audio Description – Here, the file will include audio description as well as the source audio. The downloadable formats are – MP4, MP3, OGG and WAV.
Audio Description vs Descriptive Video
The audio description and descriptive video are synonyms to each other. The service provider includes a separate narrated audio track that makes it easy for the blinds and low vision viewers to access the events and videos by describing all the relevant visual elements.
However, the difference is that the term Audio Description is used in the US and UK while Described Video term is used in Canada. Now, the subtle difference is important because Canada has different meaning for Audio Description, which is separate from the definition of Described Video.
Audio Description Services We Offer
The list of our audio description services is huge. Some of the services are –
- ● Recorded History Exhibition Audio Description
- ● Science Exhibition Audio Description
- ● Tour and Travel Applications Audio Description
- ● Webcast Audio Description
- ● Voice – over with audio description
- ● Weather Report Audio Description
- ● DVDs/ Blu – ray Audio Description
- ● Newscasts Audio Description
- ● Sports Scores Audio Description
- ● Financial Data Audio Description
- ● Audio Books Description
And many more…