Vocal delivery of audio description by genre. Measuring users’ presence

This article presents a study that was aimed at assessing presence and emotional experience of blind and visually impaired users when exposed to emotive and non-emotive content with Polish audio description (AD) delivered with two voices: human and synthetic. The results show that AD narrated by a human prompted significantly higher levels of presence for drama and was assessed by participants as significantly more interesting and less confusing. Presence rates for documentary were similar, with no statistically significant differences in relation to AD voice type. Levels of interest and confusion were comparable for both voices, with a slightly higher result for interest for the clip with AD delivered by the synthetic voice. Overall, the respondents preferred human-narrated AD for drama, but did not show a preference between synthesized and human-narrated AD for documentary. The findings are of direct practical relevance both to the industry and to academia, as they provide important information on how to select voices for audiovisual productions in practice, and suggest that AD reproduced with a synthetic voice is an effective and viable solution for voicing documentaries.