ListeningTV: Accessible Video using Interactive Audio Descriptions

Abstract

People with visual impairments suffer from the incapacity to understand contextual information in videos, such as the place where characters are, or any other non-spoken actions in general. Some content creators address this issue by providing a secondary audio to describe such information, called Audio Descriptions (ADs). How- ever, some works in the literature have highlighted that people with visual impairment are usually not able to completely understand scene changes based only on characters’ voices or traditional ADs. Moreover, traditional ADs do not completely describe some of the important visual information, such as the background scenery (e.g. colors, furniture) and characters’ details (e.g. blond woman using a red dress). In this work, we propose incrementing the traditional AD techniques with the usage of interactive video features present in TV systems. More precisely, the proposed interactivity enables users to access specialized AD for different visual information (e.g., scene, scenario, character). To support the development of such interactive content, we present an application template, which helps to create the final interactive-enhanced video application. Asa proof of concept for our approach, we created an interactive AD for an independent video mainly composed of visual information, with only a few talks.