The Embodied Politics of Audio Description

Abstract

Introduction: Experience as Contested Territory When Gardening Australia became the first program to broadcast with audio description (AD) on the ABC in 2020, the national broadcaster received complaints from sighted viewers about why their televisions were suddenly talking to them. This accessibility feature describes important visual information between lines of dialogue to ensure audiences who are blind or have low vision have a comparable experience to people who can see the action unfold. In response to viewer complaints but wanting the AD audience to feel included, the producers of Gardening Australia integrated the new feature in a segment featuring Costa smelling a flower. In a watershed moment for Australian television, Costa explained what AD was, who benefitted from it, and how to turn it off. Despite benefitting so many people, AD was introduced in Australia quietly and with seemingly minimal audience response (Department of Communications and the Arts). While researchers and advocates knew there was a demand for AD (Ellis et al.), there have been consistent gaps and silences in achieving the type of critical feedback required to provide effective, engaging and consistent AD. However, as several critical disability scholars have highlighted (Hadley; Ellcessor), there are multiple reasons that impact on audience responses to media texts and accessibility features. In undertaking this research, we acknowledge the relational nature of access; both the constant emphasis on disclosure (Kerschbaum 55), and the (unpaid) emotional labour and problematic "accommodations loop" (Price 73) people with disability experience to justify and re-justify accessibility needs (Dolmage). The specific nature of AD, both often invisible and, until recently, isolated in production, may further compound these challenges. In this article we examine the "footprint" of social media responses to AD during the 2012–2025 period in which AD first emerged on Australian screens via ABC AD trials, Netflix, and its eventual provision on ABC and SBS and their catchup services. We focus on the transformative period between 2020 and 2025, when dedicated funding enabled Australia's national broadcasters to move from trial programs to sustained AD services. Prior to this, Australia was the only English-speaking nation in the OECD not to offer AD on broadcast television. The article presents an analysis of collected data from Facebook and Reddit posts responding to media or network AD promotions, as well as posts from AD, blind, and low vision groups in Australia. Responses and engagements with AD promotions and discussions were analysed to capture the experiences of AD, beyond the focus groups or survey feedback traditionally used by media producers. While limited to engagements from social media users, it also allows for informal expressions—both positive and negative—and for reflections from a diverse audience, including but not limited to the blind and low vision community. Theoretical Framework: Embodied Media Experience and Accessibility We ground our analysis of AD as an embodied phenomenon in critical disability studies, accessibility, and translation studies. Scholarly examination of AD proceeds from translational studies, media accessibility, and universal design principles (Mazur). While distinct disciplinary approaches, the embodied experience of AD has been at the centre of each tradition of AD research. Within translational studies, researchers conceptualise AD as a form of translation—the process of converting visual elements into verbal descriptions. This framework has yielded two significant insights. First, global legislative frameworks mandating AD provision remain sparse and inconsistent. Second, cultural variations substantially influence AD practices, as demonstrated by Orero's comparative analysis of American, Spanish, and Greek audio describers, which revealed marked differences in descriptive priorities when working with identical visual content (Orero). Research recognises that user preferences vary across the blind and low vision community, with no “one-size-fits-all” approach (Jiang et al. 1). However, other research suggests that even along the spectrum of vision impairment, AD preferences are not as distinct as expected (Chmiel and Mazur 565). The absence of unified international standards for AD implementation (Fryer) has resulted in diverse national approaches to both script development and delivery technologies (Orero). Australia's Department of Communications and the Arts identified this lack of standardisation as a primary obstacle to AD implementation in their 2017 Audio Description Working Group's Final Report. The absence of established standards has enabled innovation in the provision of AD, yielding valuable insights into user experience (Walczak and Fryer). More interpretive styles have been found to better convey emotional aspects of film (Bardini; Walczak and Fryer). Instances where directors have developed AD positively influence audiences' experiences while at the same time changing these directors' creative practice (Naraine et al.; Whitfield and Fels). Media Accessibility approaches position AD as a critical accommodation for blind and low vision audiences, framing it within social inclusion and human rights discourse (Ellis et al.). AD significantly enhances the user experience and comprehension of media texts (Khang Dang and Lee; Raffi). Media accessibility perspectives recognise television and other media platforms as vehicles for community participation, providing collective access to significant events, news coverage, and cultural content. The universal design approach has gained momentum as researchers increasingly examine how AD shapes user experiences through consumer advocacy and human rights frameworks, where experiential insights and industry creativity are reshaping AD delivery models (Ellis and Peaty 135). This scholarly direction recognises that accessibility features developed to enhance experiences for specific populations often generate broader experiential benefits, aligning with established digital accessibility trends and universal design philosophy (Bownlee; Locke and Leaver; Reena). Research examining mainstream AD adoption and user experiences (Ellis) exemplifies how disability-focussed innovations can transform media experiences for diverse audiences. Universal design creates mainstream products and services that optimise experiential usability across diverse populations without requiring specialised modifications. In the context of AD, there is an increasing interest in the universal design potential of AD. For example, research from the Macerata Opera Festival in 2018 indicates that AD improved the experience for both blind or partially sighted patrons and their sighted companions (Raffi). Studies across each discipline suggest a complex interaction between varying user preferences, describer approaches, and platform- and geographical specificity. AD therefore is fundamentally about embodied experience and the ways unique physical bodies, senses, and cognitive processes shape our interaction with technology. This article proceeds from this critical disability perspective, recognising that disability is the result of a complex interaction between bodies, environments, and cultural practices (Garland-Thomson). In this framework, disability is viewed as neither entirely medical (medical model) nor solely social (social model), but as a series of material, social, cultural, political, and other contextual influences and experiences. The embodied experience of AD exemplifies this complex interplay, as it emerges not simply as a technical accommodation for vision impairment, but as a culturally situated practice that reshapes the material encounter between bodies, media environments, and narrative meaning-making. This argument is further highlighted in the analysis of social media posts made by Australians about audio description between 2020 and 2025, a time during which AD was introduced on Australian television networks. Methodology: Social Media as Experience Archive There are many approaches to analysing social media posts and traces, all of which must make significant assumptions and orientations in terms of the way any social media utterance is valued and contextualised, including assumptions about the extent to which posts reflect a broader embodied experience. For posts made in relation to AD, the lived experiences of accessibility, especially for the imagined AD audiences of blind or low-vision audiences, are vital. For this analysis, these assumptions have led the researchers to situate social media posts not as a broader discourse to be understood holistically, but rather as offering windows of documented embodied experience that are not otherwise available outside of direct interview and explicit user testimony, but require as much consideration and interpretation. Zizi Papacharissi has convincingly argued that digital and social media analysis can effectively provide a window onto ‘affective publics’, spaces where the stories, ideas, and values of specific communities and groups cohere, are retold, and are amplified in particular ways. Social media are necessarily an incomplete and imperfect representation of communities that span digital and physical spaces, but are nevertheless a form of community and communication that is visible and accessible to researchers without further impinging on time-poor groups. Social media thus can act as a reasonable proxy for group sentiment and opinion. Moreover, while certain forms of accessibility are relatively visual and apparent, others (including AD) are often occluded and mostly invisible without being explicitly raised by users and audiences. Thus, social media for this project can illuminate otherwise hidden moments of documented experience appearing online, but always already situated in embodied and accessibility