Talk:Audio description

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The content of Descriptive Video Service was merged into Audio description on 16 November 2019. The former page's history now serves to provide attribution for that content in the latter page, and it must not be deleted as long as the latter page exists. For the discussion at that location, see its talk page.

Valerieinto 21:04, 16 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I think it's dubious to be providing bare links to Ryerson's CLT research without setting up an entire section on research in general. It's especially dubious given the scarcity of published research from CLT. (It exists, but it's obscure and there isn't a lot of it. Nor does the article link to it.) – joeclark 19:52, 31 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Apologies to Jsnyder42 over my assumption that the current version of this article was a copy/paste from somewhere else. I hope you'll understand, J (what is your first name?), that Wikipedia pages arriving fully-formed without an edit summary from an international expert on a subject is a very rare occurrence. While I have no doubt that the page is indeed your own work however, it does sound like a brochure. The following things are wrong with the current text:

POV language

One example:

Using words that are succinct, vivid, and imaginative, describers convey the visual image that is not fully accessible to a segment of the population and not fully realized by the rest of us—people who see but who may not observe.

This is not wrong per se, but it does set an improper tone for a wiki page. It is also written in quasi-first-person, assuming as it does that "we" are not visually impaired.

No references

Having been written by an authority doesn't itself make a page authoritative. It needs proper citations, which is one of the improvements I made to the page I submitted. Fixing this one should be easy. (There should also be section headings, while we're here.)

Advertising

Wikipedia is very strict about advertising, and rightly so.

Recently the Center for Learning Technology has launched a new free web based video description service at (http://www.livedescribe.com). Describers can download LiveDescribe, a free video description authoring tool and create video description for video files such as avi, mov and mp4. Once the descriptions are complete, the description can be uploaded with one click to livedescribe.com. Blind or low vision audience members can then download the descriptions and play them back with the LiveDescribe Player (http://www.livedescribe.com/wiki/download.php).

While the above para would be considered harmless enough on most websites it is quite beyond the pale here. This does not further anyone's understanding of Audio Description: it's a product recommendation. The Audio Description Project paras aren't much better.

Linkspam

There are way too many external links, and not simply because there aren't inline citations. The examples section is particularly superfluous, as just one example in the introductory paragraph will suffice. The Canadian telly ones are 404ing BTW.

Others might point to your potential conflict of interest, but personally I don't care much for that rule as long as the article is good. I hope you can better understand where I'm coming from now, J. --Tom Edwards (talk) 20:20, 7 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

VocalEyes recently donated 40 recordings of audio descriptions of notable buildings in London. These can be found here https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Files_donated_by_VocalEyes Matthewcock (talk) 15:12, 18 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 2 external links on Audio description. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

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• Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20101219205423/http://audiodescription-france.org:80/ to http://audiodescription-france.org/

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I propose that Descriptive Video Service be merged into Audio description. Descriptive Video Service refers to work done by the Media Access Group at WGBH, but it has pretty much become a generic trademark for audio description, so it doesn't make much sense to have two separate articles explain basically the same concept/service. SpongeSebastian (talk) 00:24, 19 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

If merged, Audio description must be identified than more than Descriptive Video Service as this services is provided in live theater and live arts productions -- quite different than a description that is recorded or embedded in video. AudioReadingService (talk) 17:24, 9 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

There is a huge amount of overlap here and no real reason to have separate articles. JDDJS (talk) 00:31, 20 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I support merge per reason previously stated. --SpongeSebastian (talk) 19:20, 19 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I understand the desire to merge the two, but I feel that it is important to differentiate them, or at least merge the DVS article into the Audio Description one, and not the other way around. The reason being that DVS is one producer, admittedly a major one, but the technologically neutral descriptor for the tecnique is either Audio Description^[1] or Video Description^[2] (this alternative name is also cited in Understanding WCAG) -- Bpmcneilly (talk) 17:22, 20 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

DVS is just a specific implement of the concept, though "described video" is the regulatory term used in Canada. ViperSnake151  Talk  04:37, 10 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  Y Merge completed Klbrain (talk) 22:43, 16 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I contest the following incorrect information:"Silent films could naturally be enjoyed by the deaf due to the lack of spoken dialogue or sound whatsoever. " How could silent films enjoyable by the deaf if a silent film also has a piano soundtrack deaf people would not be able to hear? --Fandelasketchup (talk) 10:47, 11 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Hi! A couple years late haha, but I'm also not sure if information regarding deaf audiences is relevant in an article that is about media for blind and visually impaired audiences. I support deletion of that line altogether. Goodlucklemonpig (talk) 23:00, 2 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for speedy deletion:

• Steamboat Willie (1928) by Walt Disney (Audio Described).webm

You can see the reason for deletion at the file description page linked above. —Community Tech bot (talk) 22:23, 5 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]