Podcasts

• Colleen Connor, Founder, Audio Description Training Retreats (The Dark Room)

  Alex and Lee chat with Colleen Connor, co-founder of Audio Description Training Retreats, who discusses their journey with blindness and their work in audio description. We explore the craft of AD and how their immersive retreats are helping train the next generation of describers.

• Enhanced Audio Description (DARCI Podcast)

  In this final episode of the DARCI podcast, Mariana interviews the EAD team members about their work over the last four years. The conversation highlights how our specific research tasks, from technical plugins to creative collaborations and focus groups, are making film and television more inclusive for visually impaired audiences.

• Dr. Cynthia Bennett Part 2: What We Lose When We Stop Describing Things to Each Other (The ADNA Presents)

  Dr. Cynthia Bennett is a blind researcher at Google who studies what happens when technology is built without the people it's supposed to serve. In this conversation, we get into why imperfect, unpredictable human moments are exactly what AI struggles with most. Why she thinks claiming to be objective is less honest than just telling you where you stand. And how the process of making research accessible to her, as a blind researcher, actually changed what her research found.

• Joanne DiVito, Live Audio Describer (The Dark Room)

  Alex and Lee chat with Joanne DiVito, a former Broadway dancer and live audio describer for performing arts events in the Los Angeles area. In our conversation, Joanne recounts some of her previous experiences as a performer and how it prepared her to step into the world of live audio description.

• Audio Description on Streaming Platforms by In Touch (BBC Radio 4)

  Peter White and his guests review the audio description of their chosen offerings from major streaming platforms.

Articles

• The Audience Nobody Saw by Macy Lao (Substack)

  "... The decision about which films belong in the accessible canon is being made somewhere in the pipeline without a stated standard, without community input, and without public accountability. The industry is describing the films it decided were worth describing. The audience nobody saw receives whatever that decision produced."

• What Good Sounds Like by Macy Lao (Substack)

  " ... What’s harder to document is what good actually sounds like. Not compliant. Not a file delivered to spec. Good—the kind that makes a blind viewer realize, as Kim Charlson did the first time she attended an audio-described live theater performance, how much she had been filling in with things that probably weren’t even part of the show."

• Blind and Low-Vision Viewers Care About Screen Style — So Why Does Audio Description Skip It? by Natalie Trevonne (Popsugar)

  Fashion is almost always left out of audio description, because characters' outfits are rarely viewed as important enough to describe. Brittany Culp, a blind model and bodybuilder, wishes this wasn't a conversation we needed to have.

Video

I'm assuming Love Island is some kind of "reality" show, but the videos of the cast individually describing themselves are great. I picked two representative samples, but there's more available, as well as for The Neighborhood and I'm a Celebrity: Get Me Out of Here! Fantastic work from ITV.

• Audio Described: Ope | Love Island 2026 by Love Island (YouTube)

  Get to know Love Island Series 13’s Ope through his own words. This audio-described video features Ope narrating key visual details about himself to make the experience more inclusive for blind and visually impaired viewers. Ope talks about his muscly build and his everyday jewellery choice.

• Audio Described: Lola | Love Island 2026 by Love Island (YouTube)

  Get to know Love Island Series 13’s Lola through her own words. This audio-described video features Lola narrating key visual details about herself to make the experience more inclusive for blind and visually impaired viewers. Lola talks about the necklace she wears everyday and the colour she always wears.

• Saw X (2023)- Is This The Best Saw Film? by John Stark (YouTube)

  John Stark, a blind film critic, reviews Saw X, the 10th film in the Saw franchise. It has audio description.

Open Access Research Papers

• Integration of Didactic Audio Description into the School Curriculum

  This article aims to discuss the integration of didactic audio description into the school curriculum, justifying the need for its inclusion in the educational context. The objective is to identify the challenges and difficulties that emerge from pedagogical practices during the implementation process of this strategy.

• Beyond Words: Reception of Audio Description in Public Places Complicated by External Factors by Matt Bullen, Brett Oppegaard, Megan Conway, Sajja Koirala (Review of Disability Studies)

  Audio description (AD) studies mostly focus on compositional concerns in audience-reception matters, such as comparing a description’s length, point of view, or word choices. This paper expands those boundaries, from the words of audience members, into broader disconnects caused by delivery approaches or listening contexts that can constrain or fully disrupt public experiences.

• Event Boundary Perception in Audio Described Films by People Without Sight by Roger Johansson, Tina Rastegar, Viveka Lyberg-Åhlander, Jana Holsanova (OSF)

  This study employs an event segmentation task to examine how people without sight perceive and segment narrative events in films with AD, compared to sighted viewers without AD.

Social Media

• Bespoke Audio Description for "Harold and Maud" (1971) by Sam Cooney (LinkedIn)

  " ... Rather than the AD just being a neutral report of the visual on-screen activity, here we are trying to match the original vision of the filmmakers. This means embracing the inherent lyricism of the existing dialogue and drawing upon the ambience of the cinematography to create an AD script that sounds like it belongs in the film's universe."

• Accessibility in games still has a blind spot: audio description (LinkedIn)

  For Global Accessibility Awareness Day, we’re sharing a video conversation with Jenna "Jennissary" from Descriptive Video Works on: what studios are currently underestimating, a major misconception holding the industry back and what she believes will matter most in the years ahead.

• I get a brief. I write a script. It goes to the client. by Martin Goddard (LinkedIn)

  " ... Now I have nothing against AI. Genuinely. But a script is not just words on a page. It is timing. Inflection. Rhythm. The pause before the punchline. The sound effect that makes someone look up from their phone. The nuance that turns a decent ad into one people actually remember."

• Cognitive Load in Digital Accessibility by Johny Cassidy (LinkedIn)

  " ... For many assistive technology users, every extra step adds cognitive load. Every unnecessary interaction becomes friction. Over time, which builds into fatigue, frustration and exclusion."

Visual Resources

• 32 Micro Braids Hairstyles Ideas For 2026 (The Mom Beauty)

• 60 Braided Hairstyles for Women: Different Types of Braids (The Trend Spotter)

• Braid (hairstyle) (Wikipedia)

• List of hairstyles (Wikipedia)

• List of facial hairstyles (Wikipedia)