Seeing Film Through Sound:Sound Design, Spatial Audio and Accessibility for Visually Impaired Audiences

Enhancing Audio Description is a research project that explores how sound design, first-person narration and binaural audio could be utilised to provide accessible versions of films for visually impaired audiences, presenting an alternative to current Audio Description practices. The present article explores such techniques in the context of the redesign of the short film 'Pearl', by discussing the creative process as well as evaluating the feedback supplied by visually impaired audiences. The research presented in this article demonstrates that the methods proposed by the Enhancing Audio Description project were as successful as traditional Audio Description in terms of providing information, enjoyment and accessibility to audiences, demonstrating that both practices can coexist and as a result cater for the different stylistic preferences of end users.