Media Access Australia’s CEO will tell attendees of the 2015 conference that he sees seven key areas that will shape AD services in the five years to come:
- Automation: This will speed up some of the processes of delivery and synthetic voices will be standard, meaning you will pay more for a human reading the description.
- Presentation standards: These will still be subjective, with no worldwide quality regime in place.
- Follow the money: The monetisation of audio description, its role in boosting audiences and helping image search will be bigger commercial drivers than the value of the blind audience.
- Digitisation: Enhanced audio description using layers of digital options will provide more scope for detailed information and a better user experience, but the trick is to avoid information overload.
- Audio description playback: Voice menus and ease of access for blind people will be standard on all new devices, but there will still be hundreds of useless apps released.
- Regulations: These will not catch up and in some countries, broadcast audio description will be bypassed and the service will go straight to digital catch-up TV.
- Constancy: Some things never change. Lots of media will still be consumed by a family watching a device in the corner of the living room. That device will often be a digital TV.
This updates a broader session that Mr Varley chaired at the Languages and the Media conference in Berlin in 2014.
You can read more of Media Access Australia’s coverage of the conference online:
Top of page