Abstract
Audio descriptions make videos accessible to those who cannot see them by describing visual content in audio. Producing audio descriptions is challenging due to the synchronous nature of the audio description that must fit into gaps of other video content. An experienced audio description author will produce content that fits narration necessary to understand, enjoy, or experience the video content into the time available. This can be especially tricky for novices to do well. In this paper, we introduce a tool, Rescribe, that helps authors create and refine their audio descriptions. Using Rescribe, authors first create a draft of all the content they would like to include in the audio description. Rescribe then uses a dynamic programming approach to optimize between the length of the audio description, available automatic shortening approaches, and source track lengthening approaches. Authors can iteratively visualize and refine the audio descriptions produced by Rescribe, working in concert with the tool. We evaluate the effectiveness of Rescribe through interviews with blind and visually impaired audio description users who give feedback on Rescribe results. In addition, we invite novice users to create audio descriptions with Rescribe and another tool, finding that users produce audio descriptions with fewer placement errors using Rescribe.
Highlights
Our work builds upon prior work in creating audio descriptions, writing support, and media editing based on constraint solving
While professionals often use a mix of captioning tools (e.g., InkScribe) and audio editing software (e.g., Logic), prior work has proposed authoring tools to facilitate the creation of audio descriptions. 3PlayMedia [5], YouDescribe [25], LiveDescribe [9], and Gagnon et al [18] offer timeline-based editors for creating audio descriptions. 3PlayMedia’s post-production audio description tool [5] and Gagnon et al.’s audio description tool [18], both let authors provide text descriptions on videos, synthesizing text-to-speech for playback of the descriptions
Inline descriptions: Overall, participants indicated that the inline description example, that had been automatically edited down from the longer extended descriptions, met their expectations for audio descriptions such that they would want to use these descriptions in the future (Figure 7)
Summary
Our work builds upon prior work in creating audio descriptions, writing support, and media editing based on constraint solving.Describing videos Audio descriptions are challenging to produce, due to both the careful timing of descriptions in between existing audio content, and the multitude of production skills required for the task (e.g., scripting, audio engineering, voice acting). Our work builds upon prior work in creating audio descriptions, writing support, and media editing based on constraint solving. Gagnon et al.’s tool provides authors with timeline-based visualisations tailored to the production of cinematic audio descriptions including recognition of scenes, characters, and important locations [18]. Two tools that do allow for spoken audio descriptions are LiveDescribe [9] and YouDescribe [25]. YouDescribe and LiveDescribe are both timelinebased voiceover recording and editing tools that allow people to script and record audio descriptions. LiveDescribe visualizes predicted gaps along the timeline, but authors still must iteratively refine their descriptions to fit within the space provided. Rescribe surfaces the transcript to aid in estimating gap length, finding description vocabulary, and reflecting on the coverage of audio descriptions with the source video narration (e.g., ensuring minimal repetition of information that can be inferred)
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