Accessibility in Entertainment Opening Doors for All
06/01/2025To begin with, let us understand what accessibility means in the context of entertainment. Accessibility in entertainment ensures that all content consumed for entertainment purposes can be perceived and understood by everyone, including people with various disabilities. This content can include movies, TV shows, music concerts, sports matches, and even social media content. Some ways to make this content accessible include providing audio descriptions and image descriptions for people with visual disabilities, providing subtitles or closed captions for people with hearing disabilities and providing accessible entrance in in the movie theatres for people with mobility impairment.
As a person with a visual disability, I rely on image and audio descriptions to consume content, so I am going to discuss these features and how they have changed my content-consuming experience. Imagine this: a movie is playing on television, and you can hear everyone reacting—laughing and crying—to the scenes. But all you can hear is the background music and a few dialogues without any context. Or you come across a social media post with many likes, and people are expressing different reactions in the comments, but you cannot understand the post because the image lacks a description. This is what people with visual disabilities, including myself, experience when content is not made accessible. Thanks to some streaming platforms and screen readers, people like me can access content more easily and independently than before.
How Accessible Features Have Changed My Content Viewing Experience:
Audio Description:
Audio description involves narrating information about the visual elements in a video that are relevant to understanding the story. This can include character actions, their look and appearance, attitude and behaviors, and the surrounding settings.
Even though our friends and family describe the visual areas of the content to us but if the content is highly visual driven, it can be difficult to describe it. An example of this can be a Bollywood movie called Barfi which is about two people, a def and mute boy and an autistic girl, the movie is largely dependent on visual cues, actions and expressions, so the visually impaired person like myself cannot entirely understand the movie even if someone describes it to me, that is where the audio description plays an important part because, experience of watching the same movie with audio description was much better for me. Watching content with audio description gives me a sense of independence. I can sit alone and enjoy my favorite show without needing someone to describe it to me. When someone describes a video to me, I am perceiving the content through their vision; I am seeing the characters based on their preferences, likes, and dislikes. Moreover, different people would describe the same content differently based on their understanding. However, because audio description conveys the characters and content as they are, I can interpret and imagine the characters the way I want. This makes the content viewing experience more fulfilling.
Image Description:
Recent Talkback screen reader updates include an image description feature. It not only describes the images contents but also accurately reads the text within the image. Additionally, it describes minor details like a persons gender, outfit, hair, makeup, and even the surrounding settings.
Regarding images in entertainment and social media, many people with visual disabilities cannot use social media effectively because it primarily contains visual content, which is not compatible with standard screen readers. This feature makes it easier for us to perceive and understand social media content. Instead of having to ask for a description of every visual-based post, this feature helps me understand memes, photos, and even reels containing visual elements.
Points to Improve Accessibility Features:
The points discussed in this section are based on my personal opinion and experience and do not necessarily represent the experience of all people with visual disabilities.
The primary role of audio description is to describe the visual elements of a video. However, for audio-described content on some streaming platforms, the narrator translates dialogues into the videos primary language whenever another language is used. For example, in a Hindi video, the narrator will translate all English dialogues into Hindi. This can be annoying because the original dialogues are sometimes suppressed by the translation. Secondly, the translated dialogues are not always accurate. Sometimes, a dialogue is spoken using specific words or phrases crucial to understanding the character or the story. When such dialogues are translated using general phrases or expressions, it can change the meaning. For instance, if a character has a defining signature dialogue or phrase not in the videos primary language, translating it can change the original meaning and expression, preventing me from fully understanding the character.
Similarly, the image description feature analyzes the image for us along with providing a description. The image description should convey the details in the image as they are presented and allow people to interpret the image according to their own understanding. For instance, if there is a meme about Indian family dynamics, there is no need to explain that the meme is meant to be funny and relatable; let people decide if it is relatable to them.
I mention these points because the whole idea behind audio and image description is to convey the same information that is visually available. When the description conveys inaccurate or unnecessary details, it negatively affects the content viewing experience.
Conclusion
To conclude, Accessibility features have helped people with disabilities experience the same world that people without disabilities experience. These features have allowed us to interact with people and participate in current trends and conversations, which in turn has made our lives more meaningful, independent, and inclusive.
Nikita Sonawane