Method and system for aligning audio description to a live musical theater performance

Audio description, an accessibility service used by blind or visually impaired individuals, provides spoken descriptions of visual content. This accommodation allows those with low or no vision the ability to access information that sighted people obtain visually. In this paper a method for deploying pre-recorded audio description in a live musical theater environment is presented. This method uses a reference recording and an online time warping algorithm to align audio descriptions with live performances. A software implementation that is integrated into an existing theatrical workflow is also described. This system is used in two evaluation experiments that show the method successfully aligns multiple recordings of works of musical theater in order to automatically trigger pre-recorded, descriptive audio in real time.