Audio Description Customization

TL;DR

This paper explores how customizable audio descriptions can better serve blind and low-vision viewers by allowing personalization of content and presentation, leading to improved understanding and engagement.

Contribution

It introduces CustomAD, a prototype enabling audio description customization, and demonstrates its effectiveness through user studies with BLV individuals.

Findings

Customization improves video understanding for BLV users.

Participants reported increased immersion and navigation efficiency.

Design considerations include balancing customization benefits with potential concerns.

Abstract

Blind and low-vision (BLV) people use audio descriptions (ADs) to access videos. However, current ADs are unalterable by end users, thus are incapable of supporting BLV individuals' potentially diverse needs and preferences. This research investigates if customizing AD could improve how BLV individuals consume videos. We conducted an interview study (Study 1) with fifteen BLV participants, which revealed desires for customizing properties like length, emphasis, speed, voice, format, tone, and language. At the same time, concerns like interruptions and increased interaction load due to customization emerged. To examine AD customization's effectiveness and tradeoffs, we designed CustomAD, a prototype that enables BLV users to customize AD content and presentation. An evaluation study (Study 2) with twelve BLV participants showed using CustomAD significantly enhanced BLV people's video understanding, immersion, and information navigation efficiency. Our work illustrates the importance of AD customization and offers a design that enhances video accessibility for BLV individuals.