Audio Description in Advertising

Image Description: A pale-skinned hand pointing a remote at a blurry TV some distance ahead.

This article is based on the A11yNYC talk by Eric Wickstrom and Liz Gutman of the International Digital Centre (IDC).

In this presentation, Eric and Liz discuss audio description (AD) advertising. They’re astonished that companies haven’t used this tool to reach consumers in the blind and low-vision community for the past decade.

When the FCC mandated that companies start doing audio description, everyone had no idea what audio description was. The FCC has updated information for 2025 on Audio Description | Federal Communications Commission. If a network drops out of the top 10, they’re no longer mandated to do AD. Nonetheless, you’d hoped they would keep doing it. But they stop and funnel the money elsewhere.

Moreover, the mandate only applies to primetime hours. That’s a drawback because people are home during the day with a vision disability and not getting AD. The FCC gave all the networks five to six months to create AD or else face fines. The networks rushed to do the AD and sacrificed the quality.

There are a lot less ADs than there should be. Once the streaming services launched, lawsuits happened and everybody got shamed into creating AD. Everyone rushed in to create as much AD as possible, as fast as possible, to get the annoying disability advocates off their backs. That resulted in a vast amount of very average to poor offerings. This is surprising because advertisers don’t want to be associated with shoddy products.

There are millions of blind and low-vision people in North America. The number grows every year. As people get older, the population ages and loses their vision. They all want access to advertising too. It’s not a gift or a charity cause. Since companies want to focus on money, why wouldn’t advertisers want to access this audience who also has money and wants to spend it?

According to the CDC, about 12 million people 40 years and older in the United States have vision impairment. This includes 1 million with blindness. As of 2012, 4.2 million Americans aged 40 plus have uncorrected vision impairment. This is predicted to more than double by 2050, so again, this is not a small number of people. About 7% of children under 18 have a diagnosed eye or vision condition, about 5 million, and nearly 3% of children under 18 have blindness or visual impairment. This is a big audience that’s growing.

The Real Price of Audio Descriptions

If you wanted to complain to the company airing an ad for not making it accessible, how would you go about it? Where do you start? And to that end, why would any company expect loyalty from a consumer that they’re not even considering in their marketing efforts? Blind people have money to spend. They are loyal consumers. And they’re part of families that are also loyal. Some won’t watch anything, whether their blind loved one is with them or not if it doesn’t have AD. And why not? A lack of accessibility signals a lack of interest, care, and acknowledgment. Advertisers are ignoring an entire segment of potential consumers, why would they want to buy?

In pitching AD for a car commercial, the company pushed back saying Blind people don’t drive. They ride in cars. But their families buy cars. Why not target the family? That’s something that the family would recognize. If the family is watching AD at home together, a commercial comes on for a car and they’re making the effort to target and acknowledge and talk to those consumers. When it comes time to buy that car, the family will keep that in mind because the company cared enough to sell it to you and talk to you and address your needs as well as the consumer.

A few years ago, the average price of a Super Bowl spot for a 30 spot was $7 million. Yet, they had no AD tracks. If a company spends $7 million for a 30-second spot, wouldn’t they want to maximize my reach? Instead, they left 5 to 10 million people in the dark, so to speak by not targeting them in their ads.

For just 0.04% of a Super Bowl ad’s cost, companies could make their content accessible to millions.

Toyota made a minute-long commercial that cost $14 million. It featured a blind guy, an athlete, running around. The whole commercial about this guy is an inspirational one. Yet, it had no AD track. Isn’t that ironic? To do an AD track for that, using the same math, 0.0214% of that $14 million to engage 8 to 10 million people. If you’re creating a commercial about a blind guy, you would think you would want to cater to and engage with the blind audience that might be drawn to this commercial.

When streaming services were making episodes that were $4 million an episode, AD is $2,000 or $3,000. It costs less than a craft services table for a day. They’re spending all this money to make television while leaving all these consumers out there, people who clamor for AD.

Many people will call out brands that don’t have AD. They’re not shy with their opinions. When you’re doing great, they’ll let you know that, but they’ll let you know when you’re screwing up. It keeps companies accountable. If you target them and work for them, they will recognize it and be appreciative if you do it well or at least make an effort to do it well.

AD Challenge: No Room

The biggest challenge companies give for not including AD is there’s no room in our spot to include audio descriptions. That can be true. Some of these spots are very, very talky. There’s not a lot of room. It’s a constant voiceover, constant person talking. The solution is simple. Create a different commercial and play it on the audio description audio track. When you go to audio settings on Netflix or HBO and select pick audio description, it plays just that track.

Audio tracks usually live on the Spanish audio channel and play there. You can upload a second version of the commercial to Spanish audio for broadcast or the streaming sites where there’s an AD track for the commercial. For times when a commercial has non-stop talking or it wouldn’t make any sense what that brand is, write a second commercial that targets blind and low-vision consumers.

It’s a great opportunity to get creative. Build a separate audio-described version of the commercial that could be embedded as a second audio track to play out either on streaming services or broadcast as any other AD track would.

AD Challenge: Alignment with Messaging

Clients put a huge premium on their brand assets and don’t want them compromised in any way. How do you make an ad accessible while maintaining brand integrity? It’s easy. Work with the studio creating the AD. A simple review of the script will enable the language to fit whatever the client wants it to be. Before it gets recorded, the team can come up with wording to make everyone happy.

Also, the advertiser should keep in mind when casting the voiceover talent. They want to make sure that not only is the tone and feel right but also the talent is culturally appropriate for the spot they’re voicing. Like with all things, accessibility should be considered from the beginning and working together.

AD Challenge: Resistant to Cost

What’s the return on investment? Already covered in the big football game math, it makes no sense to pay a $14 million buy-in and not make a few grand to target another 5 to 10 million consumers. Sometimes it requires opening a dialogue with clients and educating them that the brand will be respected and honored. The cost is minimal.

The AD doesn’t have to be done by the same voiceover person. A lot of times advertising people say it costs so much because of residuals from hiring professional voiceover people and celebrities to do these commercials. You don’t have to use them for the AD. The AD track can be a separate entity. You can hire a different voiceover person. Consider hiring someone who is blind or has low vision to do the voiceover.

AD Challenge: Distribution and Technical

Streaming services have an advantage in that viewers can turn on audio descriptions. Anytime there are ads in the streaming services, the audio description will play too. Viewers won’t go to a separate channel. The ability to turn AD on and off beyond streaming networks is coming.

For “All the Light We Cannot See” on Netflix, there was an official teaser with an open audio description. The trailer on YouTube received more than 130,000 views. There’s a second one that has more than 80,000 views. That’s a big return on that small investment to get those views. People who don’t use AD were telling others to check it out because it’s interesting or cool.

AD Challenge: Getting Feedback

Companies want to know if their AD is effective. Companies need to hear from blind and low vision audiences. They want to know if they’re on the right track. Do they like the way the company handled this? IDC fought early on to get their name put on their audio tracks because they wanted people to find them so they could tell them how their AD was working. IDC made changes to their internal style guide based on feedback.

It’s imperative for anyone doing accessibility that they have folks from the community you’re serving working on the project as it goes along. At the very bare minimum, you’re getting feedback from the community you’re serving.

How can a client do that? It’s easy to do that on social media. There are communities dedicated to audio description. Every streaming service has a feedback option that goes directly to people working there. It may or may not be easy to find, and some are better than others with responses and calls to action. In IDC’s experience, Netflix is very responsive to that type of thing.

Don’t be afraid to get constructive feedback because that’s what you need to make sure that you’re making the ads accessible in a way that drives your metrics and sells the products you want to sell. IDC wants all feedback including the negative ones. They want to know what they do wrong so they can do better. They want to be held accountable.

Other AD Challenges

While there’s progress, AD can run into a separate but equal situation. For example, some ads will have a described version online. There was an AD commercial appearing during the big game, but it was not on the network.

You had to go online to watch it. It sends a message that the company knows some viewers use AD, but they don’t think it’s important enough to air it during the main game.

Sometimes AD can overexplain or be focused on the client’s preferences rather than what the audience needs. That’s why feedback is essential.

And finally, there is a lack of precedent or style guidelines. Many companies don’t know how to go about it. So, they avoid bringing it up and don’t do anything. That’s why the community needs to keep making noise about it. When that happens, brands will take notice.

Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies in AD

How are AI and technologies influencing the future of audio description? The problem with AI is that it’s solving a problem that doesn’t exist. They say it’s going to save money, but most are not even spending money on AD. That’s just an automatic response because companies are driven by cost.

Saving money also sacrifices quality. Having a whole lot of AD with no quality is a waste of money. The feedback about synthetic isn’t positive. People want a human voice. Viewers feel disrespected when they hear a computer doing the voicing.

Again, the actual price of doing all these things, it’s not that much. You can hire a real company with real people, employing real folks from the community, and have companies specializing in AD do the work, for a small piece of the budget to do the AD properly. Besides, if one brand uses a cold synthetic voice and the other uses a human voice, which one will people respond to more? That’s a price a brand will pay when it doesn’t do AD properly with humans who know how to do it.

Of course, AI has good use cases. It can work for social media content, alt text, reading text on screen, and so on. But when it comes to storytelling, human-created AD helps tell the story. People connect with the human touch. And that reflects well on the brand.

Putting It All Together

In short, education is key. Most lack of accessibility is due to ignorance. Once they learn about accessibility, most are excited to learn more and be more inclusive. Whenever Liz tells people what she does for a living, 100% of the time, they think it’s cool and didn’t know it existed or that Blind people watch TV.

Of course, build in accessibility from the start of the process. It counteracts all the aforementioned challenges. The cost is nominal. The team can address all timing and creative challenges during production and woven into the final product. And finally, include disabled experts in accessibility creation. If you’re not doing this, it’s lip service.

Ensure you get feedback from the audience that you’re making your ads accessible for and include them in the process. There are many cool hilarious ingenious disabled talented creatives out there who would be great at doing this. Seek them out and hire them.

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Eric Wickstrom is a multi-award-winning Audio Producer, Director, and Podcast Host with over 14 years of experience specializing in the creation of audio content for leading networks and streaming services. He has personally directed/produced thousands of audio projects for clients all over the world.

He’s most proud to lead the Audio Description team at IDC. Universally regarded as one of the best AD departments in the industry, IDC just won its second consecutive “Audience Choice Award” from the American Council of the Blind in 2024. Connect with Eric on LinkedIn.

Liz Gutman is the head Audio Description Writer at the International Digital Centre (IDC) based in New York City. In her six years of working in access, she’s been privileged to write (and occasionally voice) AD for hundreds of projects, from independent films like Best Summer Ever and Crutch to blockbuster series including Bridgerton, Squid Game, and All The Light We Cannot See.

IDC’s AD department won a 2021 AD Achievement Award from the American Council of the Blind’s Audio Description Project; as well as ADP’s 2023- and 2024-People’s Choice Awards. Liz proudly helped lead the charge to onboard blind and low-vision narrators into IDC’s workflow starting in 2020.

She also teaches an AD Fundamentals course with Audio Description Training Retreats; and is host/producer of the podcast Access F*ckery. Liz is always looking to improve her craft and to connect with others who are passionate about creating high-quality audio descriptions. Connect with Liz on LinkedIn.

Featured image by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash.

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