Exploring the Use of Narration for Audio Description in Enhancing Blind and Visually Impaired Children's Visualization of Video Movie Films

Watching movie or television is always a challenge for the blind and visually
impaired people because most of the scenes are not verbally described in order to
give the full view of the program content. This has narrowed the opportunity of the
blind and visually impaired people to access interactive leaming in order to acquire
knowledge and skills for independent living. The developed experimental model of
Audio Video Describer (AVD) that uses Bahasa Malaysia and English short cartoon
movie film with the integrated narration is believed to assist the blind and visually
impaired children to experience movie film. Data resulted from a survey containing
ten questions on perceptions in the form of Likert scale rated from I being stongly
disagree to 5 being strongly agree. Comments and feedback were gathered through
interview from the respondents after each stage of AVD developed. Based on the
analysis of the evaluation results of first draft of AVD, second draft of AVD was
developed and the evaluation was repeated to determine the effectiveness of the
AVD model. The final AVD models were tested on normal sighted students, six
visually impaired adults and also on the blind and visually impaired children. The
key findings from the analysis showed that the language, voice, pitch and timing
used for the audio description are suitable. This indicates that the AVD potentially
can assist the blind and visually impaired children to experience and to enjoy the
movie film. With the use of AVD, it can result in minimal help from the normal
people to describe the movie for them.