Why Customers Love Our Audio Description Service

Audio description, an accommodation for blind and low-vision viewers, narrates the important visual information of a program and assumes the viewer cannot see the on-screen content.

If a person is blind, low-vision, or is multitasking and can’t fully focus on a program, audio description may be used to comprehend the information that might be missed without the ability to see the content. Audio description would describe elements such as non-verbal cues like gestures, facial expressions, and eye contact.

Why Audio Description Matters

Communication is a daily part of human interaction, and about 80% of it happens non-verbally. If a person cannot actively see these non-verbal elements including body language and visual cues, they miss out on crucial details that can’t be conveyed through words alone.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. There are details from the environment and natural scenery that add a substantial amount of context to a storyline. Visuals paint a vivid picture of the plot, and with audio description, viewers can listen along and fully immerse themselves in the story.

 

 

At 3Play Media, we understand the importance of providing audio description as an accessibility tool, and our customers do, too. Here’s why our customers love our audio description service:

Customers Rate 3Play’s Audio Description Service

We’re proud to serve thousands of customers from diverse industries. They produce a wide range of content including TV shows, films, training videos, music videos, and so on. One type of tool can’t be expected to suit every video. That’s why we offer two types of audio description – standard and extended. Of the customers that use our audio description service, 64% use standard audio description, 14% use extended audio description, and 19% use both.

When customers were asked how happy they are with 3Play’s audio description service, we received a rating of 4.22 out of 5 stars and positive feedback. It’s safe to say that customers are satisfied with our service, and we’re ecstatic to hear that! Here’s what our customers had to say about our audio description service.

What Differentiates 3Play’s Audio Description Service from the Rest

When choosing an audio description vendor, there are many factors to consider like cost, quality, and features.

Saves You Money

Cost is usually the most considered factor when making an important purchase, however, understanding the audio description vendor’s process can help you gain insight into the true value.

The price of traditional audio description can vary greatly. It usually ranges anywhere from $15-$30 per minute, and humans are used throughout the entire workflow.

Writers create a transcript and a human voice actor delivers the description within specified timecodes. Hiring voice actors and writers can become costly, and when you combine the cost of the equipment used to record and implement the audio description, you can be looking at a very large sum.

The combination of humans and technology is the process we use for our captioning and transcription services at 3Play, and it’s a critical part of our audio description service as well. Certified human describers write the descriptions, while synthesized speech is used to voice these descriptions. This method makes the process easier and faster while saving you money.

10 Questions to ask an audio description vendor.

Quality Comes First

If you’re familiar with our captioning and transcription services, you know that accuracy is a huge priority for us. When choosing an audio description provider, it’s important to choose one that will deliver high-quality descriptions.

Providing accurate descriptions not only makes your content accessible, but it also makes it enjoyable for your viewers.

In recent years we’ve seen captioning lawsuits specifically surrounding the accuracy of captions. Such lawsuits have set important precedence on providing high-quality and accurate accommodations. It can be inferred that the same standards would hold true when providing audio description.

Although there are no clear laws in place surrounding the accuracy of audio description, the Described and Captioned Media Program (also known as the DCMP) provides general guidelines on key elements for creating high-quality descriptions.

Quality descriptions must be:

• Accurate: no errors in word choice, pronunciation, diction, or enunciation.  
• Prioritized: provide descriptions that complement the original content and portray only what is physically observable, rather than motivations or intentions.
• Consistent: content and voicing should match the style, tone, and pace of the program
• Appropriate: be neutral, simple, and succinct.  
• Equal: the meaning and intention of the program must be conveyed and the describer shouldn’t inject personal interpretations or opinions.  

Easy-To-Use Features

Another important factor to consider is features for your audio description service like the ability to customize and edit descriptions, as well as assistance with publishing.

A vendor that allows customization of descriptions for your unique needs is one that understands the importance of flexibility. With the 3Play account system, customers can choose the speaker’s voice and make edits to the descriptions.

On the contrary, when you use a traditional audio description vendor, making edits can be an expensive process. If you want to make changes, you would have to pay for the human voice actor to record the descriptions again.

Since we use synthesize speech, you can easily make edits to the Account System. Any saved edits will automatically update to all output formats – at no extra cost!

3Play’s audio description plugin ensures our customers are assisted during the publishing process. The plugin is a simple embed that plays the secondary audio description track alongside your video, alleviating the issue of video players that don’t support audio description.

Learn all about audio description in our beginner’s guide: