Audio Description Quality: Best Practices and Legal Standards
Updated: April 10, 2025
This blog was written by Michal Nowicki. It has been updated for relevance and accuracy by AJ Beltis in conjunction with Michal Nowicki.
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Video is everywhere. It’s on our TVs, computers, smartphones, tablets, and even some smart refrigerators. But have you ever wondered how blind and low vision viewers access video content?
To fully enjoy all the movies, TV shows, and other video content we so much love to watch, people with vision loss rely on audio description (AD) to access the visual elements of a video.
Unfortunately, the quality of AD varies significantly among its providers – and so do consumer preferences on what visual information should be described, in how much detail, and how the descriptions should be voiced.
Not surprisingly, then, while several U.S. laws require audio description, none of them currently impose minimum quality standards on AD providers. However, that minimum isn’t out of the realm of possibility.
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) — the country’s leading AD regulator — hosted an AD forum in 2022, in which the public was specifically invited to weigh in on AD quality, among other topics. The discussion generated a diverse range of insightful comments on the subject, reaffirming that viewers who depend on AD remain deeply divided on the preferability of human narrators over text-to-speech voices. Therefore, it is possible that the FCC will initiate rulemaking proceedings to examine what AD quality standards, if any, should be adopted.
Independent of its legal requirements, the quality of audio description is of utmost importance to those who rely on it. Imagine if the only way you could understand something is by listening to a description of it, but the sound was dulled and filled with pops and skips, while the descriptions themselves didn’t offer enough detail to paint the full picture of what’s happening. This is what consuming video content with poor audio quality audio description is like for those who are blind and have low vision.
In this post, I will discuss best practices for high-quality AD and will share my thoughts on whether legal AD quality standards are on the way. I will focus primarily on the ongoing contentious debate over human vs. synthetic AD.
But first, let’s define audio description, clarify how it works, and briefly explain how it is regulated in the United States.
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What is Audio Description?
Audio description (also referred to as “description” or “video description”) is the verbal depiction of key visual elements – such as the action, settings, facial expressions, costumes, and scene changes – in video productions. It is primarily an accommodation that allows blind and low vision viewers to gain a complete understanding of the program, so that every viewer can maintain the same level of situational awareness.
Now, let’s explore the various available types of audio description.
Standard vs. Extended Audio Description
Do you need standard or extended audio description? Short answer: standard works if time allows it – but when it’s needed, extended should be used.
- Standard AD inserts verbal narrations of the visual elements of a video into natural pauses of the described content, such as gaps in a film’s dialogue. Standard AD is ideal for videos with long pauses between meaningful auditory cues or that do not contain speech at all. Describers add concise descriptions of visual elements where space allows.
- Extended AD allows the video to be paused, as needed, to make room for the description. Extended description is preferable over standard description when a video contains significant visual content, but few natural pauses to squeeze in meaningful descriptions without pausing the video. It’s an ideal accommodation for blind and low vision students taking cinema classes, in which they must analyze artistic effects of lighting, camera movements/angles, and other visual characteristics of specific scenes that standard description could never capture adequately.
Standard AD is more popular and more widely used than extended AD, because standard AD does not interrupt the video stream – it’s also easier and cheaper to implement than extended description.
How is Audio Description Legally Regulated in the United States?
Various U.S. laws require audio description. Let’s look at some of the most notable ones below.
CVAA and FCC Requirements
The Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA) implemented FCC audio description regulations that require top broadcast and nonbroadcast networks to provide at least 87.5 hours of audio-described TV programming each calendar quarter. They also require cable, satellite, and telecommunications providers to pass on AD to their subscribers whenever the networks offer it. Finally, video playback and recording equipment must decode and pass through AD.
ADA Requirements
Under Title II, The Americans with Disabilities Act will soon require pre-recorded video content distributed online by public entities to come with audio description. Entities with populations of 50,000 or more must comply with this rule by April 24, 2026. Entities with populations smaller than that amount have until April 2027.
The ADA also requires movie theaters to make AD available to blind and low vision patrons upon request whenever they show a digital movie that is distributed with AD.
Additionally, since streaming sites are considered “places of public accommodation,” they can be subject to lawsuits for failing to provide accommodations such as audio description. This is the situation that Hulu found itself in back in 2017.
Rehabilitation Act Requirements
Finally, the ADA along with Sections 504 and 508 of the Rehabilitation Act broadly require AD as an auxiliary aid that is necessary to communicate effectively with blind and low vision individuals through video content.
Quality of Audio Description
Audio description is a subtle art that requires a creative approach to describing video content. Describers must constantly decide what should be described, what is not important enough to be described, and how to describe visual content accurately, objectively, and concisely.
How Much Visual Content Should Be Described?
The answer is not as clear as you might think. Some blind and low vision people are so dependent on AD that they will not even try to watch a video if they know that it has not been described. Others are more patient and adventurous, willing to make the effort to determine how much information they can gather from dialogue, sound effects, and other auditory clues.
Generally speaking, however, most blind and low-vision viewers appreciate at least some description – therefore, when in doubt, always add AD to your videos.
In particular, you should sufficiently describe the objective and observable behavior displayed on-screen. Focus on describing anything factual, like facial expressions, scene changes, and design elements. Remember, if you need more time to describe video than a scene allows, you can always rely on extended audio description.
On the other hand, avoid describing that could be considered subjective, interpretive, or analysis. Speaking to a character’s thoughts, feelings, or motivations wouldn’t be appropriate for audio description.
Choosing Between Human and Synthetic Audio Description
Human description occurs when the description is voiced by a human narrator. Synthetic description is voiced by text-to-speech software.
Synthetic audio may be more appropriate in some non-entertainment settings, such as professional training videos. In education and work environments where efficiency is essential, synthetic description designed with customization in mind can still offer viewers the ability to change AD voices, as well as adjust the speed, pitch, and volume of AD independent of all other audio, as desired.
On the contrary, my experience has taught me that human AD is typically preferred for videos whose purpose is to entertain. Synthetic AD quality can be lacking, and sound isn’t always edited. Additionally, the prevalence of so-called “audio ducking” – lowering the volume of the video’s audio while AD is playing – is more likely to happen without human review and can disrupt the viewing experience.
Recently, however, AI-enabled audio description software with expert human review has addressed many of these concerns. We’re at the point where AI-enabled AD tracks are quality in sound and content and can be expeditiously reviewed and edited by humans before publishing online content.
This feature substantially reduces the cost of producing AD content and expands the overall availability of AD. Lily Bond, 3Play Media’s Chief Growth Officer, explained the benefits of this approach for Accessibility.com.
Are Legal Quality Requirements for AD on the Horizon?
Under the current administration, it seems there are no legal requirements for audio description quality on their way. It is more likely that deregulation is on its way.
In March of 2025, the FCC called for comments on the deregulation of unnecessary rules that could cut costs. However, the public notice did ask for clarification in these comments, encouraging commenters to answer questions such as “are there rules that remain in the Code of Federal Regulations that no longer have any operative effect,” and “have the imposition of new rules or other regulatory requirements rendered a given Commission rule no longer necessary?“ For this deregulation to impact audio description, there would need to be a substantial proof point that AD has no operative effect.
Additionally, the Texas v. Becerra lawsuit is challenging Section 504, which prohibits programs that receive federal funding from discriminating against those with individuals. While this filing may seem concerning, the Pacific ADA Center reports that several attorneys general of the 17 states on the filing “said the lawsuit would be dropped or that their state would withdraw from it.”
In short, there don’t seem to be any legal motions at this time to define quality requirements for audio description in the near future, and some efforts are in place that may jeopardize AD’s requirements more generally. However, any changes to audio description – whether the imposition of new regulations or the rolling back of existing ones – would very likely face significant uphill battles to reach a compromise between government branches, media producers, programming distributors, and consumer advocates.
Meanwhile, we continue to live in a world where legal AD requirements exist without specifying what steps providers must take to ensure that its quality is acceptable to all who benefit from it. Video creators and distributors should partner with an audio description vendor that ensures consistent quality to be ready if regulation does come into play.
About this guest author
Michal Nowicki is a telecom, technology, and digital accessibility attorney at Marashlian & Donahue, PLLC, The CommLaw Group. He has a strong personal interest in accessibility and a life-long passion for audio description. Even well before joining the CommLaw Group, Mr. Nowicki worked closely with Comcast and DirecTV to ensure that both companies comply with the FCC’s audio description regulations. More recently, he submitted public comments to the FCC on how its AD rules have been implemented, hoping that the FCC will expand its AD requirements to cover video-on-demand programming and TV broadcasts delivered online. He also provided a highly interactive, in-depth overview of AD requirements under U.S. laws at the 2021 Jacobus tenBroek Disability Law Symposium.
