Comparing British and American Audio Description of Movies
2026-08-10 • Computation and Language
Computation and Language
AI summaryⓘ
The authors studied how audio descriptions for movies differ between the United Kingdom and the United States. Audio description is the spoken narration that helps blind and visually impaired people follow a movie's story, fitting into gaps between dialogue. They compared the official guidelines and actual descriptions for 206 movies and found clear differences in word choice, grammar, and how scenes and characters are described. Their findings give a detailed, data-based look at how the narrative style varies across these two regions.
Audio DescriptionNarrative TechniqueBlind AccessibilityLexiconProgressive AspectPassive ConstructionSubjective AdjectivesDialogue OverlapBritish EnglishAmerican English
Authors
Igor Sterner, Alex Lascarides, Frank Keller
Abstract
Narrating the visual component of movies is known as audio description. It is a narrative technique designed to enable blind and visually impaired individuals to follow the story. However, it is far more constrained than most narratives: the descriptions not only need to convey the story in the movie, but they must also fit into gaps between dialogue and they need to conform to guidelines that exist in each region. In this work, we compare audio description created in the United Kingdom against audio description created in the United States. We use guidelines written for these two regions, alongside the impressions from a practitioner in the field, to motivate specific hypotheses about the differences. We test these hypotheses against our pre-existing corpus, which provides both human-authored American and British audio description for each of 206 movies. Results provide quantitative evidence to uphold all tested hypotheses, including differences in lexicon, the use of the progressive aspect, the use of passive constructions, the use of subjective adjectives and modifiers, when characters are named, how scenes are cued, and degree of overlap with movie dialogue and music. Our work offers a quantitative lens into the narrative technique of audio description.