Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2025

On Thursday 15^th May the Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) was held at the Sky Cinema in Osterley. Myself Penelope Parisi and my two fellow Audio Describers Ciaran McLaughlin and Naomi Paul had the pleasure and privilege to be on the panel where we could raise awareness amongst our Sky colleagues about the service we provide to the blind and partially sighted community, enabling them to enjoy the vast range of great shows that Sky has on offer with AD.

The event hosted by Renee put the audience members in the seats of our AD users by playing a five-minute clip I had scripted and voiced from the 2024 Action/Sci-fi movie Transformers One with only sound and no pictures. The excerpt was immediately replayed with AD from the start with the visuals being included halfway through the scene. The floor was then opened to feedback on the audience’s experience. It was extremely gratifying to get a lot of positive comments from the attendees who represented a wide cross section of AD familiarity. Everyone agreed that it’s imperative to add context and detail to a programme and without the AD they simply couldn’t follow the film and very quickly “zoned out.”

After the clip my colleagues and I were delighted to answer the many questions posed to us, for example on the way AD works, how we script and do the voice overs, how long the process takes, use of language and how we vary our approach to different genres, such as kids v horror. We also had the opportunity to talk about Audio Introductions, a pre-show narration which provides an additional verbal description outlining key visual elements that we may not have had the luxury of time to describe within the title. 

In the many collective years, we have been doing Audio Description we have been part of and passionate about the ever-evolving first rate service that we provide. Most recently we have embraced the introduction of the use of synthetic voices on some of our titles and the use of AI tools to help during the scripting phase of our work. The GAAD event was a wonderful opportunity to get feedback, helping us to develop our roles further and to shine a light on Audio Description and accessibility. Hopefully this will be the first of more such opportunities to interact with our customers in the future.

For more information on Audio Description please head over to the accessibility website where you can find out more.