While closed captioning and text transcripts are common accessibility tools that are widely used and integrated into technology, descriptive audio is not as well developed. Descriptive audio consists of brief statements that provide information about the scene in a video for people who are blind or have low vision. Similar to alt text for images, descriptive audio should highlight the key details in the video. However, unlike alt text—which must be included even if a description exists elsewhere in the document—descriptive audio is only necessary when the media does not already provide an audio description of the space or speaker.

Tips for Creating Descriptive Audio

Plan ahead during the video creation process. You can add pauses in your script for descriptions of the setup or incorporate descriptions directly into the script.
Describe only what is visible on the screen, not emotions or intentions that cannot be seen.
Focus on describing what is important; skip details that are merely decorative. At the same time, don’t overlook the setting when describing a space. For example, “Standing at a podium in front of a large classroom” conveys a different message than “standing in front of a large room.”
As with the alt text exercise, close your eyes, listen to the video’s audio, and consider what information might be missing.
If the video includes text or a title card, make sure to include that information in the descriptive audio or in the video’s spoken content.

Technical Limitations

The University of Redlands video platform, Kaltura, does not support adding a descriptive audio track or automatically generating descriptive audio for videos. Therefore, users must create a second video and either edit in or plan for descriptive audio during production.