Audio Description in Advertising

ERIC WICKSTROM: My name is Eric Wickstrom. I'm the head of audio production for International Digital Centre, known as IDC if you hear us on any audio description tracks. That's my main focus, the last 12 or 13 years of my life, audio description for all sorts of providers, networks, and streaming services. You've probably heard our work if you've listened to AD somewhere and enjoyed it. Ben Ogilvie reached out to me on LinkedIn. He said... Hey, you want to talk about advertising audio description? I said we don't really do much with it. It's been a real thing that stuck with me, the last 12 or 13 years.

He said come rant about it. So that's what I did. I brought Liz here to help with the presentation. We're gonna talk advertising, where we think there are opportunities and things I've been dumbfounded about, the last 12,13 years, about why we're not using this more as a tool to reach consumers from the blind and low vision community. With that, Liz?

LIZ GUTMAN: Yeah. Hi. My name is Liz Gutman, head audio description writer at IDC in New York. I'm a white woman in my early 40s. I have brown hair with bangs and I wear glasses. I've been writing AD since 2018, training others to write AD since 2021 and hosting a podcast about accessibility called... Cover your ears... Access Fuckery, since this year, where I invite a member of the disability community to rant about failures in accessibility and how it impacts them.

Increasing accessibility across the board, like in advertising where it's not considered all that much at all, currently, is something very close to my heart. It impacts my friends and even if you don't know it, it impacts your friends too. So I was really excited when Eric asked me to help do this presentation with him. ERIC WICKSTROM: All right. So... A little bit again... I mentioned I've been doing this 12 or 13 years. I was working for USA Network, and the FCC came in and mandated: Start doing audio description. Everybody was like... What is audio description? Fair question. Nobody knew what it was. Brave new world. So this was a solution that they threw out there... The government should get involved. Not always the best results. For numerous reasons. First it was only the top five. Now it's top ten. They allow networks to drop out.

If you drop out of that top ten rating, you're no longer mandated to offer AD. You would hope they would keep doing it. No. The money goes elsewhere, we find. And then they mandated that it only happens in prime time hours. That's a drawback also. People are home during the day with visual impairment and not getting any AD. So it had the effect of getting a lot of AD created, but like everything, it was a rush to do it. They gave everybody five to six months with threats of big fines and everything. So everybody kind of rushed to get it done as quickly as possible and as you can imagine, the quality was not particularly great. That's when we started seeing... I started questioning why we weren't doing -- they were spending a lot of money back

then, a lot of money, to make audio description, putting it on air, prime time, all other times, and the commercials would start and it would all go away. That made no sense to me. Why we were targeting blind and low vision viewers and the advertisers weren't coming along. I thought there was a lot of opportunity there. And still do. If we could sell advertising space in AD tracks, more people would want to make them and air them. As we know, the answer to all your questions in life is money. I understand. Everybody wants to make money. Wants to reach the biggest group of people and audience they can. There's a way forward with this stuff outside of just prime time and top ten networks. There's a lot less AD than there should be. What happened was -- once the streaming

services launched, as you know, when you followed accessibility -- lawsuits happened and everybody got shamed into creating AD. We saw the same thing. Everybody rushed in to create as much as possible, as fast as possible, to get the annoying disability advocates off their back. So we got a vast amount of very average to poor offerings. So while there is great work happening out there, I feel like also if advertisers were linked to this work, they would want the level of that work to come up quite a bit, because they don't want to be associated with shoddy products. That's where there's a lot of opportunity and hopefully we can go forward and see some of that change. Liz?

LIZ GUTMAN: Yeah. There are millions of blind and low vision people in North America. There are more every year. As people get older, as the population ages. And loses their vision for whatever reason.

Those people all want access to advertising too. It's not a gift or a charity cause. As Eric said, money solves all your problems. Why would you not access this audience who also has money and also wants to spend it? It just doesn't make any sense. To get in some numbers... So this is from the CDC. And it's tough to get exact numbers on blindness and low vision or visual impairment, as the CDC and a lot of government entities call it, for various reasons. Blindness is a spectrum and often the data are years behind what's actually happening now. But 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, already 13 years ago, 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. Defined as having trouble seeing even when wearing glasses or other corrective lenses. So again, this is a big audience, and it's only going to grow. ERIC WICKSTROM: So we... There it is. So I'm gonna play an ad here. I asked Ben to get me an ad and I'm going to play it for the room.

And at the end I would like you guys to guess what this is advertising. We stripped the video out of this. There's no dialogue. You'll hear some sound effects. If you were a blind or low vision person, imagine watching television. This is the experience you're gonna get from this ad.

So... Anybody want to guess? Yes, sir. Second row.

(inaudible)

ERIC WICKSTROM: Incorrect. Guess again. What is it? Not an iPhone. No. No. So... We debated...

Let's play 20 seconds, 30 seconds. No. Let's play the same thing. Again, the experience, if you're blind or low vision at home, no idea what's going on. So we created AD for this example.

It's not cars, it's not Sprite, it's not Apple. Let's try the accessibility version of it.

I just want to jump in really quickly.

This is a pair of Levis. Denim rests on a folded stack. A Black man with an afro walks past a pile of folded Levis. He walks through a city sidewalk under a forest, disco dances, rides a motorcycle, and pulls them off while canoodling with a woman, who pulls the jeans over her swim suit, goes roller skating, and plays pinball. Someone else wears them with a faint faded outline. A young brown skinned man irons on an alien patch, skateboards, the knee gets ripped. A woman jogs up a staircase and jumps up a river. So you can wear them longer. A stylish young copper skinned woman eyes them.

She leaves the store wearing the jeans and moves along a city sidewalk. Her phone fits perfectly in the pocket. Buy better. Wear longer. Levis. ERIC WICKSTROM: How would you have any idea what that was? And if you're Levi's... I've met a lot of blind people in my job. One thing they all have in common -- every one of them owns a pair of jeans. Why aren't we targeting that community? Liz, I cut you off there, I'm sorry. LIZ GUTMAN: I just wanted to mention as -- since I'm remote, we didn't hear the audio the first time when it was played without video. So that ad is just a bunch of sounds. There's fabric rustling, there's party sounds, clackity clacking of what we know are wheels now, water, rain -- it's all very confusing. So I just kind of wanted

to underline that. After the fact. ERIC WICKSTROM: So... We were talking about -- I'll let Liz take this one. But like I was touching on -- you're literally leaving money on the table if you're advertising. LIZ GUTMAN: Yeah, exactly. If you were blind and this ad came on, and you're like... Well, I would really like to know what that's about... I'm on the edge of my seat. What's the answer to this mystery? If you wanted to complain to the company airing this ad for not making it accessible, how would you go about it? If you're at home by yourself? Where do you start? And to that end... Why on earth 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, of care, of acknowledgment. So if you're ignoring an entire segment of potential consumers, why would they want to buy from you, and how would they even know to do so, if you're not making your advertising accessible?

ERIC WICKSTROM: Yeah. That's a giant pet peeve of mine for years now. Is when... You know, first of all, we'll get into millions and millions of millions of people we're talking about this affecting. But I've heard the answer when I pitched this for a car company, why don't you do AD for a car commercial? Blind people don't drive. They ride in cars. Their families buy cars. Why not target the family? You know? That's something that the family would recognize. To Liz's point.

Watching AD at home together, commercial comes on for a car company and they're making the effort to target and acknowledge and talk to those consumers. Yes. I think when it comes time to buy that car, you might keep that in mind. Because this company actually cared enough to sell it to you and talk to you and address your needs as well as the consumer. It's a weird thing. When we say there's 8 million blind people. Yeah. But if the average family is 3 or 4 people, we can multiply that number and that's the number that these ads and these AD tracks are being utilized by. Additionally, we'll get into it more as we go. It's not just blind and low vision people utilizing AD. We know that. We'll talk about that more as we go. This is one that drives me nuts.

The Super Bowl. A few years ago. I mean, I just extrapolated some numbers here. The average price of a Super Bowl spot for a 30 spot was $7 million. Okay? No AD tracks. Which is a weird thing for me. If you're gonna spend $7 million for a 30 second spot, I would want to maximize my reach. I wouldn't want to leave those 5 to 10 million people in the dark, so to speak. And not target them in my advertising. You know, doing some basic math, and this is a range. Don't quote me on this later down the line. If you go to a different company and they quote you something higher or lower. But for the sake of argument, I tried to figure out... $3,000 I thought was a fair

number to do a one minute spot. And some cutdowns and what-not. So let's call it $3,000 across the board. For the Super Bowl example... $7 million, assuming $3,000. It's 0.04% of that total budget to create the AD track. It costs 33200 times more to create the commercial than the track added to it. That doesn't make sense to me, as a numbers guy. My favorite -- Toyota, god bless them, they made a minute long commercial, 14 million dollars. It featured a blind guy, athlete, in the woods, running around. Whole commercial about this guy. Inspirational commercial. No AD track.

I found that to be an odd choice. 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. So when you start crunching the numbers, it's a head scratcher.

You're spending all this money. When streaming services were making episodes that were $4 million an episode, AD is 2 or 3 grand, it's less than craft services table for a day. You're spending all this money to make stuff for television but leaving all these consumers out there, people clamoring and wanting this material. Just a little bit more. Cheap gets expensive.

It's a big thing here with advertising. A little cheap and it's costing you a lot of money by not doing it. Fast food is another one. I mean, this is America. Right? We know. We spend a lot of money on fast food and a lot of money marketing fast food. So just doing some basic internet research... Billions. That's the best I can give you. 3 to 4 billion a year fast food companies spend advertising in this country. McDonald's alone spend close to $400 million. I didn't see any AD tracks or outreach. If we assume $100,000 a spot, 50 spots a year, $150,000 -- to do their entire television run of AD -- 0.0375%. Of that 150,000 into 400 million to make things accessible for a blind audience. Again, blind people buy jeans, eat fast food, order pizza. Dominoes spends

$7 million a year to advertise on television and media. I keep saying... I don't know why for such a little bit extra of a buy-in of the budget we're not thinking about these things. So Liz, the consumers... We pulled some stuff off the internet, people responding to having non-described and described commercials. LIZ GUTMAN: Yeah. Eric and I and our whole team at IDC feel really strongly about staying in touch with the community that we serve. We're really active and engaged, having conversations constantly. That's the only way we can get better.

Out of curiosity, I was like... Let's see if people have said anything about this. Here are some quotes posted by blind and low vision audience members on social media. One. I had no idea what the commercial was for or about because it was not audio described. It was clearly about a person with disabilities. How ridiculous is that? So stupid and annoying. There is a commercial playing in this market, possibly others, where there's a male voice who says to a child what is this? The child says your wings. Then spirit in the sky starts playing and a voice says light them up. Can someone describe that commercial? Three. I was wondering if there was any audio description for this Toyota commercial. My friend and I tried to find it but were unsuccessful. If there isn't

any, that's pretty ironic. If there is, we would love to be pointed in the right direction. And finally: This commercial needs audio description. So... There is not only frustration. It's palpable. You can feel it. In these comments. But there's also curiosity. There's someone literally describing what they experienced with a commercial and saying: Could someone please tell me what this is about? People want to know. They want to be engaged. You know, it is frustrating. I get frustrated talking about it. And all of these comments took me about five minutes to find on one social media site. So... They're out there. ERIC WICKSTROM: Yeah. So... And there are now...

None of this tonight is to say that nobody is doing audio description commercials. There are. There are some companies that have invested some money over the years doing it. Nowhere near the level we want to see it at. But it would be disingenuous to say no one is doing it. There are a handful out there. We pulled some reactions from those things as well.

LIZ GUTMAN: Yep. One. Since discovering a few commercials that have been audio described, I find I enjoy a good cute commercial. Two. I was pleasantly surprised to find a commercial for downy unstoppables that had audio description. It was pretty cool. It made me realize I would be more likely to watch commercials if they had audio description. I know some companies describe their commercials. The current Starbucks commercial is described, for example. It's great that Mastercard is making their cards and commercials accessible. And five. Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade is awesome with audio description and enjoyed a commercial with AD. This should be standard for everything on TV right now. So thankful for this. Happy Thanksgiving, all. Smiling face with tear emoji. Note in both cases audiences are eager to call out brands that are making that effort to

make their advertising accessible or ignoring them completely. Brand loyalty cuts both ways. Right? So obviously if a brand name is never spoken, going back to the Levi's commercial, a blind or low vision user on their own is not going to be able to even know which brand is leaving them out of the conversation. So you could... Air quotes... Get away with it. But the question is... Do you want to be that brand? And I hope the answer is no. But you know...

Clients seem to have a lot of reasons to not make their ads accessible. So I would love for Eric -- you want to start busting some myths? ERIC WICKSTROM: Sure. It's worth repeating there.

The callout of the brands. A lot of people, God bless them, are not shy with their opinions. This is something I learned over the last decade. When you're doing great, they'll let you know that, but they'll really let you know when you're screwing up. Which keeps us accountable as a company. If you target them and work for them, they will recognize it and be appreciative if you do it well or at least give the effort to do it well. So this is a big one we hear a lot. Timing. There's no room in our spot to include audio description. 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.

I've always advocated for -- why not just create a different commercial and play it on the audio description audio track? That setting? When you go to Netflix or HBO and go to audio settings, you pick audio description. It just plays that track. When you watch something on television, standard broadcast, people do that. It usually lives on the Spanish audio channel and plays out there. I don't understand why when the shows play out and the commercials start, the AD goes away. You could 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 as well. If you run into a commercial where there's 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. So I asked Ben to

get me a sample. This is not the best example. I'll be honest with you. Because without AD, you could probably figure out what this commercial is. But this is just an example of a really talky commercial where traditional audio description fitting in between dialogue is probably not gonna be an approach that works in any real creative way without cramming it in there and stepping all over the dialogue of the commercial. I'm gonna play the regular commercial and show you what I was thinking on the other side. VIDEO: Hello, ladies. Look at your man, now back to me, now back at your man, back to me. Sadly, he isn't me. But if he stopped wearing his body wash and started old spice, he could smell like me. You're on a boat with

the man your man could smell like. Back at me. It's an oyster with two tickets for the thing you love. The tickets are now diamonds. Anything is possible when your man smells like old spice and not a lady. I'm on a horse. LIZ GUTMAN: It's actually pretty audio described as it is, that commercial. Imagine none of that was about the product. We see those commercials all the time. They don't talk about anything. It's abstract, meant to be creative and misleading for the consumer into the end. And nobody even -- sighted people don't know what's going on in the commercial 'til the tag comes up at the end. If you wanted to do an alternate track, you could do something like this. VIDEO: A handsome fit black man stands in front of

a shower with a towel. He holds up a bottle of old spice and declares himself the man your man could smell like. The towel flies off and the scene changes to the deck of a yacht. He holds up an oyster with the ticket to that thing you love. The view pulls out to reveal he's sitting on a horse.

The text: Smell like a man, man. Old spice.

So I don't... When I hear that myth... Oh, there's no room for audio description... Maybe not. So let's get a little bit more creative. Let's 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. I don't understand... It's not that hard when you explain it. To wrap your head around. That seems to be one of those excuses we hear from potential clients. There's no room. We're not gonna bother. Thanks anyway. This is one we hear too, Liz.

LIZ GUTMAN: Yeah. Alignment with messaging is a big one. Which is understandable. 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 actually super easy. You 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 and everyone can come up with wording that everyone is happy with, before it gets recorded. Also the advertiser should be keeping in mind the voiceover casting to make sure that not only is the tone and feel right, but the talent is culturally appropriate for the spot they're voicing. But yeah. It's all about just considering it from the beginning and working together. Easy. ERIC WICKSTROM: And this challenge. Client

resistance to cost. What's the return on investment? I took you through some of that math. You can't sell me on a $14 million buy-in and can't make room for a few grand to target 5 to 10 million consumers. That doesn't make sense to me. Like Liz said, education, talking to clients, having that dialogue, making sure -- the brands are important. We get that. Some of these brands are hundreds of years old, plus. We want to make sure we're honoring the brand properly. That's the conversation you have to have. The cost really is minimal. I broke it down. Not a huge amount of money when you consider the money being spent to create these commercials and put them on air. As Liz touched on before, communicating with clients about not only dollars and cents,

but the overall value of being accessible in making yourself an accessible product in that way -- and then this is the one too. It doesn't have to be the same VO person. A lot of times when I talk to advertising people, they get tied up with -- it costs so much because of residuals. Hiring professional VO people, celebrities, to do these commercials -- well, you don't have to. The AD track can be a completely separate entity. You can hire a different VO person. I would recommend hiring a blind person to do the VO. At IDC we've worked with over 3 dozen blind professionals.

We work with blind audio engineers. So there's a real opportunity there. We're not the only ones. We pride ourselves on being one of the companies that take the most care in doing it. But there are certainly other companies out there doing it as well. So that would be a nice thing too.

You could work with companies to not only create audio description, but also employ people from the blind and low vision community in creating those ads. And that's a message you could sell too, along with your product. That's a wonderful initiative people should look into as well. Along with the VO, traditional commercials, depending on the markets and all this stuff -- all sorts of residuals, like I talked about. That adds to the cost. But you could do a simple one time buyout, use a non-union VO person -- there's ways to make these spots and make them cost effective as well. So you're not... So that idea of the cost should never be the reason not to do it.

There's always a conversation to be had. You want to do it well. You want to work with a good company that's gonna do a proper job. But the cost is really not prohibitive in any way.

In my opinion. When you start getting down to the return on the investment. And so yeah. The distribution -- that's another one you run into with clients. We can't do it. We have to reconfigure our systems to do it. We already talked about -- broadcast -- Spanish audio. It's a separate track. Streaming services, however they're embedding the audio, you're embedding the separate track. If you put on Netflix and audio description, everything you put on after that defaults to audio description in all the streaming services. They do it on purpose. So if you have an ad-based subscription, same thing. Commercials start, AD starts with it. If all of that stuff is not possible,, like, right now on YouTube, they've been working on this for years. Being able to toggle off and on audio description. That's coming. I've been hearing about this for a while

and I believe they're working on it. Eventually you'll have that option to toggle on and off. But for now, it would be open AD. You have a separate version of that commercial or trailer. We did one for Netflix last year -- I should have looked it up. For All the Light We Cannot See. We did a trailer. It was open audio description. Put it on YouTube. And it had... Tens of thousands of views. So the money that we spent to make that... I mean... I don't know. I wish I had looked it up.

I don't know if you looked up what the final view count is currently. But it was a tremendous return on that small investment to get those eyeballs on it. And people who aren't particularly into AD say check this out. This is interesting. This sounds cool. So I don't buy that money is an issue. It's not that cost prohibitive. And I don't believe technical. We put men on the moon. I can't believe we can't figure out how to put an AD track on a streaming service commercial. I don't believe in my heart that that's true. Feedback, Liz? LIZ GUTMAN: I was looking up that trailer.

Currently the audio described trailer for All the Light We Cannot See has 130,000 views on YouTube. So... There you go. This is something we have to do all the time. We are a bunch of nice sighted people working on audio description. That's great. We need to be hearing from blind and low vision audiences -- are we on the right track? Do you like the way we handled this? Did these subtitles? Described this person? Handled this action? We fought early on to get our name put on our audio tracks because we want people to be able to find us and know who is doing the audio description so they can tell us how we're doing. We made changes to our internal style guide. It's imperative for anyone doing accessibility that you're constantly... Ideally

you 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. So how can a client do that? Really easy one is social media. There are communities dedicated to audio description...

There's a huge one on Facebook. X is a little falling apart right now. But the newer ones, like, Mammoth and Blue Sky, 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 response and calls to action. In our experience, Netflix is very responsive to that type of thing. Others, I hear from a lot of folks that they'll email and never get a response. But there are ways to do that. There are tons of organizations like... The ACB, the NFB, the AFB, local organizations, you know, do focus groups. You just kind of need to start thinking about it from that point of view.

And those specific needs that this audience will have. And to not be afraid to get constructive feedback. Because that's what you need to get, in order to make sure that you're not just making the ads accessible, but you're making them accessible in a way that... You know... Drives your metrics.

That sells the products you want to sell. ERIC WICKSTROM: Right. Yeah. I mean, you have to care. LIZ GUTMAN: You do have to care.

ERIC WICKSTROM: And do a minimal amount of effort. It's not that difficult. And to Liz's point, we want the feedback. Now, luckily, we pride ourself -- we do really good work. I'm very blessed that I have for my money the best team in the world doing audio description. They make me look much better than I deserve to. But I always say: We don't hide. We want to hear the negative stuff too, if you have it. I joke if I only want to hear positive stuff, I call my mother, she says I'm amazing and I hang up and go about my day. No. Tell us what we're doing wrong and what we can do better and we'll work on doing that. If something gets messed up in a track, not often,

knock on wood -- but if it does, we want to fix it. Make sure we're findable and accountable for our work. It's important. We're here to serve the blind and low vision community. It's our role and we need to be held accountable. So it's seeking out the good and the bad so you can do better.

Liz, the current examples in the industry? LIZ GUTMAN: Yeah. Cannes introduced for the further time awards for accessibility in 2025. Expanding the Glass Lion to including disability communities and a subcategory in the design Lions that awards image descriptions. Some brands like PNG, Unilever, Microsoft, are championing accessibility in really cool ways. There is progress that's happening. But on the flip side, there can be a kind of separate but equal vibe.

For example, some ads will have a described version online. But the ad won't air. During broadcast. With the audio description. So there was an ad that... I'm not gonna call anything out.

Because I don't want to get anybody in trouble. A friend of mine voiced it. We were all really excited. We were like... Oh, accessibility! Yay! Sorry. Got so excited I'm hitting my mic here. We were all so excited to hear it during the Super Bowl. During the broadcast, the ads started playing and there was no audio description. Turned out you had to go online, Google it, go to the brand website, find it, and listen to it there. And that's kind of an icky way to go about it. It signals... Oh, we know you're here. But we don't think you're important enough to put on the main event. Audio description for ads currently can also tend to overexplain. Or be more subject to the whims of the client than actually giving their audiences what they need. And what

they want to know. Again, going back to getting feedback. That's why it's necessary. It's not a lot of precedent. So I think maybe... That kind of can cause hesitation on the part of advertisers and agencies. No one really knows how to go about it. So in that case, it can kind of feel easier to just not do anything. Or not bring it up. And hope it kind of goes away. But we feel really strongly that we just need to keep making noise about stuff like this. Because eventually, you know, that's how you get people to pay attention. ERIC WICKSTROM: All right. And then looking ahead a little bit here... AI. And other emerging technologies. How are they influencing the future of audio description? Oh yeah. AI. My issue with AI... It seems to be... Especially

with advertising now, it's solving a problem that doesn't exist. They're talking about... It's gonna save us money. But you're not doing anything already. So you're not spending. So how are you saving any money? That's the question. And my issue with AI, and I'm not anti-tech and anti-future and all this stuff, but everything so far around AI and synthetic... It's always driven by cost. Right? That's always the thing you hear first. It's gonna save money. And any time we're saving money, we're not focusing on the quality. So that's cool. Let's have a lot more quantity.

But a lot more quantity with no quality is just a big pile of crap, is what it is. All right? So that's my issue with AI. It's not focused around... We can crank out so much more content that's gonna be amazing and everyone is gonna love it. It's just about... Let's crank out more.

And more for the sake of more is not... It's not great. In my experience. And again, this idea that it's gonna save all this money that they're not spending... You know, if we start talking about the actual price of doing all these things, it's not that much, as we outlined. You can hire a real company with real people, employing real folks from the community and have companies like us do your work, and spend a pitiful amount of your budget to get the work done properly or keep pushing into AI just to get it done. Whatever. But I will say...

Synthetic... Some blind folks... This is not a consensus. But generally we don't hear positive things about synthetic. They don't love it. They like human voice. They feel disrespected. We hear that a lot. It's disrespectful to have computer voicing. Not everybody, but I would say a majority of folks. So if you're a brand and your direct competitor -- you're one of the top five car companies, you're gonna make a commercial, it's AI driven, synthetic voice and your direct competitor makes one of beautiful human voices, you find out it's a blind voice, even better. Which one is the community gonna respond to more? The synthetic computer cold voice or a human voice by a real person? That's something to consider. Cheap gets expensive. I say that all the time. Liz is tired

of hearing me say it. But it's true. In your race to save a couple pennies, you're losing a lot more on the backend. Liz, conclude us. LIZ GUTMAN: I'll tack on one more thing about AI. What I've heard from folks in the community is not that AI is bad in all applications. You know, with social media, everyone is a content factory. Right? So for things like alt text, for things like... TikToks, reading text on screen, kind of workaday stuff like that, I've heard -- sure, great, yes, go for it. No problem. But when it gets into storytelling, and ads are telling stories... Again, back to Eric's point, the spend on producing an ad and carefully controlling all of these brand assets and everything, then why when you're about to bring it over the finish line

would you just slap on some horrible synthetic voice? It doesn't make any sense. Either for the advertiser or for the consumer. Conclusions. So education is key. We hope that this has been educational. Or at least interesting. Most lack of accessibility is due to ignorance. And... A lot of it is, anyway. There are dastardly people out there, I guess. But a lot of lack of accessibility is due to ignorance. And most people are excited to be more inclusive when they learn about it. Whenever I tell people what I do for a living, 100% of the time, they're like... Oh, that's so cool! If they didn't know it existed, they go... I didn't know that existed. Blind people watch TV? That's wild! So educate people. Tell other people about it. Get them excited.

Consider accessibility from the beginning of the process. This basically solves everything that we talked about. The cost is nominal. All timing and creative challenges can be addressed during production and woven into the final product. And then everybody is happy. And last, certainly not least, include disabled experts in accessibility creation. If you're not doing this, it's lip service. Again, the absolute bare minimum is to get feedback from the audience that you're making your ads accessible for. But include them in the process. There are so many cool hilarious ingenious disabled talented folks out there. Creatives. Who would be great at doing this.

So hire them. Seek them out and hire them. ERIC WICKSTROM: Yes. And then some further reading and resources. Liz? You want to... LIZ GUTMAN: Oh yeah. Let me just... It's too small on this screen for me to read it. Yeah. There's just a few... Just a couple articles I thought were interesting. There was a survey about accessibility in advertising done by ClearCast. I think they're in the UK. A really interesting presentation by Liz Jackson that is about... It's not specifically about advertising, but it touches on stuff that we talked about today. And just another cool... It's just a bunch of cool stuff that kind of... The circles overlap to form in the center. You know. The Venn diagram. Accessibility in advertising. So I think they're all worth checking out.

ERIC WICKSTROM: Yeah. If you want to contact us... You know... And talk more about this... We're always happy to sit down. We are geeks for AD. I think that's fair to say. So we love sitting down and chopping this up and talking about it. You can contact me, [email protected]. Eric with a C.

And Liz is [email protected]. You can find us on LinkedIn, DMs are open, and I'm still on X. I don't know how much longer. But I'm still there. You can find me there too, on BlueSky. We're not hiding. We want the feedback. If you enjoy this, let us know. If you think you can tweak this, make it better for the next time, let us know. And thank you for having us. If you have questions, we'd like to take a couple. THOMAS LOGAN: Thank you so much, Eric and Liz. We're gonna open up questions. We have a few questions already from the YouTube stream. Have about ten minutes for questions here in the room and we'll also be able to hang out here in the room and have more of a conversation. Starting off, any questions in the room for Liz or Eric? Raise your hand.

You touched on this at the very end. It seems really obvious to have the agencies involved in this. Because they're pitching their services to the clients. And as they pitch them, they can say... For only a little bit more money, we can do all of this and here is your return on investment. And the marginal cost is probably easily 50% or more profit to them. Does all this... When I look at it... Maybe as little as a dozen hours added to the overall cost of creating a production. ERIC WICKSTROM: Right. I reached out to ten to twelve of the big agencies. In New York City. Nobody got back. Just to have a conversation.

To your point. Let's just talk. This is not a sales pitch. I was really just trying to gather information for this deck about: Are you being approached? Are we having these conversations? If we are, why aren't we doing it? What's the value you're seeing? Didn't hear back. I'm gonna keep trying. This came together in last few weeks. Ben and I were talking about it for a while, but with the holidays and everything, it snuck up on us. It's something we need to pursue just for information gathering. I don't understand it. It's probably even less time than you're thinking.

This old spice... Not the old spice, but the Levi's one we presented tonight... What did that take? 2 hours total to put together?

From start to finish? Yeah, probably.

We weren't working with the brand. We know if the brand gets involved they'll have feedback and feedback about the feedback. We get that. Left to our own devices, we did what we wanted, got a VO person -- two hours. It's not that much time if you hire a professional and trust us to do our jobs. You'll probably... It won't even be that much time. I was gonna say Ben. That's not Ben. It's Brian. THOMAS LOGAN: We're gonna take a question from YouTube now. I think this is a question relating... I guess the comparison of availability. Which platforms or channels carry for example a separate Spanish language audio stream? Is there more prevalence for multilingual versus audio description?

ERIC WICKSTROM: It depends on the network. Some networks have Spanish audio one and two. When the FCC mandate came in for USA, when I was there, any Spanish was thrown out. Because we were being threatened by the government and we put all the AD on the Spanish audio track. That's pretty much where it lives. I would assume... I know for CBS... For all the broadcasts, probably on the Spanish audio channel, a monofold-down of the AD track. 2,4,5,7... CW is 11 in this area. I don't know where it is elsewhere in the country. They have one or two shows they describe. I don't know about the whole catalog. I assume it lives there as well. I would guess it's the majority of where that's going. THOMAS LOGAN: Thank you. Brian?

BRIAN: Thanks. That was the exact question I was gonna ask. So we covered it.

Great. THOMAS LOGAN: Jessie?

So when they charge for advertising on a network, would they charge extra for AD? To put the slot in? Is there an extra charge for that? ERIC WICKSTROM: I'm sure they'll think of that. If they get to that level. Right now, I cannot imagine... Again... It's being done at such a small level. I can't imagine there's a charge for that. I can't speak completely for that. When that asset comes in, if you're doing... NCIS for CBS, which is now in its 30th year. Lost count at this point. When it's added to the network, it's required to have that track there as well.

It's part of the deliverable. They're not charging extra. It has to be there because of the mandate and everything. If you're doing an ad buy for tens of thousands of dollars, and you have an AD track on there, I can't imagine they're gonna have much leverage to say... Pay us more for this. So that's the other thing too. I don't think... It doesn't cost that much to make. I don't know why it would cost more to air it. But I don't know for sure. THOMAS LOGAN: One more question from YouTube. I think this is a technical question. Is there a technology that moves the audio descriptions around text that's open captioned or embedded in the video? I'm thinking when closed captioned text is overlapping text on the screen. I think they mean for captioning

of audio description in that scenario. ERIC WICKSTROM: Oh. That's interesting. Liz, have you heard of that? You're saying... If AD is playing, kind of like we did with our videos, the AD is being captioned? I haven't heard of that. Liz, have you?

LIZ GUTMAN: It's rare that it happens. Because... Most... The point that we're at with them, streamers and broadcast and everything... It's kind of binary. You either need closed captions or audio description. So... They haven't really caught up to the fact that having both might be helpful for folks. That would be rad. For it to be more widespread. We did the captions for these videos. And Meryl and the fine folks here did the captions for the presentation and everything too. So... Big ups to them. But it's rare that it happens in general. So I don't know of any specific technology to kind of handle both AD and captions and captioned AD.

And it would get a little bit muddy, I think, also. Especially if it's an action film. Yeah. Bridgerton -- sweeping long passages of romance and description. In a very talky reality show or stand-up special or something like that. It's just gonna be caption on top of caption on top of caption. Just one big block of text on the screen after a while. For certain things, certainly for action films, something like 14,000 words in a script -- the original Fury Road, 41 lines of dialogue in the whole film. What a nightmare. That would have been cool. But generally it's not an ask too much. THOMAS LOGAN: We love to ask the tough questions here at Accessibility New York City. There was a comment from Meryl that it sounds like ABLEPlayer might have demos of that online. It's a tool online. We'll take

one last question here in the room. Shafik.

Thank you. So I guess this is really general kind of high level question... Also... You might have addressed it earlier on in the presentation.

I just maybe wanted to ask it again anyway. What would you say is the most challenging category of content to really do audio descriptions for? I know overarchingly in a lot of cases it was pretty straightforward if you just put the effort against it. But I wanted to see what the edge or the boundary was. ERIC WICKSTROM: The most challenging type of audio description generally to do? I'll let Liz take that one.

LIZ GUTMAN: Honestly... I would say comedies that are really talky. Because there are often a lot of visual jokes but there's also a lot of talking happening. And there's just a million decisions you have to make about what to prioritize. And when to talk over the dialogue if you need to, to get a joke. Or when you have to let one go. It's just... It's just a million decisions you have to make. One after the other. THOMAS LOGAN: All right. Thank you both for the excellent presentation. One more round of applause for Liz and Eric. ERIC WICKSTROM: Thank you.