When creating instructional videos for your courses, accessibility should be a central consideration. This includes ensuring that videos meet visual contrast standards, that captions are accurate and properly synchronized, and — critically — that key visual content is accessible to learners with low vision through audio description.
What is Audio Description?
Audio description is the practice of narrating key visual elements to ensure that learners who are blind or have low vision can fully engage with educational content. However, its value extends far beyond accessibility for students with disabilities. Consider, for example, a student listening to a video lecture while commuting—without visual access to the screen, they miss important contextual cues. Similarly, a student watching a lecture on a small phone screen may struggle to discern critical visual details. In both cases, audio description can bridge the gap, providing access to integral information that might otherwise be lost. Research indicates that audio description enhances sustained attention and helps all learners, not just those with visual impairments, to better process and understand visual content. Even sighted students benefit from descriptive narration, often demonstrating improved comprehension and engagement as a result.
How Do You Get Started?
Rather than treating audio description as a reactive accommodation, it should be integrated proactively into your video design. Doing so promotes inclusivity from the outset and saves time by reducing the need for retroactive adjustments. While audio description may initially seem daunting, incorporating it during your lecture is far more efficient than trying to add it afterward. For example, if you’re presenting a graph or chart, consider the following questions:
- What essential information do students need to understand the graphic?
- What concepts will they be expected to recall later?
As you speak, explain the graph’s key takeaways aloud. Avoid relying solely on visual cues such as color or pointing. Instead, describe the content clearly so that a student who cannot see the graph still receives the same information. Like alt text, describing images that are decorative or irrelevant to the material is not necessary. This practice of incorporating audio description may help you clean up your presentations to be as straightforward and relevant as possible.
Examples of Audio Description
Example of Inadequate Audio Description of a graph:
As you can see here, the red line goes up, and then it drops after Q2.
Improved Example with Proper Audio Description:
This line graph shows quarterly revenue growth. Revenue increases steadily from Q1 to Q2, peaking at $150,000, before declining to $100,000 in Q3.
Below is a video of an instructor inadequately presenting a graph based on a ranked choice vote of students favorite snacks. Listen to the audio without watching the video and determine if you’re able to understand the information on a graph.
Now, here is a video of an instructor presenting the same graph, but using the principles of audio description correctly. Without looking at the screen, do you take away enough information to understand the outcomes?
Practice until it’s a habit
Make it a habit to describe any meaningful visual content you present—be it a photo, video, graph, or chart. Doing so not only helps students with visual impairments but also encourages all students to engage more deeply with the material. A useful exercise is to describe a graph aloud to a colleague or friend without showing them the visual and then ask them to repeat the key points. You could also put practice graphs into Microsoft Copilot or Gemini and ask AI to describe it. Did it get the key points? Is that what you would’ve said? What would’ve you done differently (remember, AI isn’t always accurate!). Taking time to practice these descriptors before you film or do a live lecture will help you get into the habit of describing visuals naturally. This practice can sharpen your focus on what truly matters for your students' understanding and save you time re-doing your work if you have a student that has an accommodation for audio descriptions.
To see examples of professional audio description, try enabling the feature on a streaming service like Netflix (note that not all titles are audio described; Zootopia is a fun one that has audio description available), or search for examples on platforms like YouTube. With regular use, audio description can become a seamless and natural part of your teaching practice. For further insights on the importance of audio description, check out Audio Description: If Your Eyes Could Speak, presented by the Accessibility Ambassadors.
Author: Melissa Olson
Like what you read? Subscribe to the Extra Points Google Group for an email notification when the next blog post goes live.