Deploying Prerecorded Audio Description for Musical Theater Using Live Performance Tracking

摘要

Audio description, an accessibility service used by blind or visually impaired individuals, provides spoken descriptions of visual content. This alternative format allows those with low or no vision the ability to access information that sighted people obtain visually. In this paper a method for deploying prerecorded audio description in a live musical theater environment is presented. This method uses a reference audio recording and an online time warping algorithm to align tracks of audio description 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 prerecorded, descriptive audio in real time.