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The You Described, We Archived dataset (YuWA) is a collaboration between San Francisco State University and The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute. It includes audio description (AD) data collected worldwide 2013-2022 through YouDescribe, an accessibility tool for adding audio descriptions to YouTube videos. YouDescribe, a web-based audio description tool along with an iOS viewing app, has a community of 12,000+ average annual visitors, with approximately 3,000 volunteer describers, and has created over 5,500 audio described YouTube videos. Blind and visually impaired (BVI) viewers request videos, which then are saved to a wish list and volunteer audio describers select a video, write a script, record audio clips, and edit clip placement to create an audio description. The AD tracks are stored separately, posted for public view at https://youdescribe.org/ and played together with the YouTube video. The YuWA audio description data paired with the describer and viewer metadata, and collection timeline has a large number of research applications including artificial intelligence, machine learning, sociolinguistics, audio description, video understanding, video retrieval and video-language grounding tasks.

Dance is regarded as visual art form by common arts and science perspectives. Definitions of dance as means of communication agree that its message is conveyed by the dancer/choreographer via the human body for the observer, leaving no doubt that dance is performed to be watched. Brain activation elicited by the visual perception of dance has also become a topic of interest in cognitive neuroscience, with regards to action observation in the context of learning, expertise and aesthetics. The view that the aesthetic experience of dance is primarily a visual one is still shared by many artists and cultural institutions, yet there is growing interest in making dance performances accessible for individuals with visual impairment / blindness. Means of supporting the non-visual experience of dance include verbal (audio description), auditive (choreographed body sounds, movement sonification), and haptic (touch tour) techniques, applied for different purposes by artists and researchers, with three main objectives: to strengthen the cultural participation of a non-sighted audience in the cultural and aesthetic experience of dance; to expand the scope of dance as an artistic research laboratory toward novel ways of perceiving what dance can convey; and to inspire new lines of (neuro-cognitive) research beyond watching dance. Reviewing literature from different disciplines and drawing on the personal experience of an inclusive performance of Simon Mayer's "Sons of Sissy," we argue that a non-exclusively visual approach can be enriching and promising for all three perspectives and conclude by proposing hypotheses for multidisciplinary lines of research., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2021 Bläsing and Zimmermann.)

Audio description remains the cornerstone of accessibility for visually impaired audiences to all sorts of audiovisual content, including porn. Existing work points to the efficacy of audio description to guarantee immersion and emotional engagement, but evidence on its role in sexual arousal and engagement in porn is still scant. The present study takes on this challenge by comparing sighted and visually impaired participants' experiences with porn in terms of their physiological response [i.e., cortisol and heart rate (HR)] and self-report measures of affect [Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS); Watson et al., 1988], anxiety [State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI); Spielberger et al., 1970], sexual reactivity and arousal [Sexual Inhibition/Sexual Excitation Scale (SIS/SES); Moyano and Sierra (2014); and the Ratings of Sexual Arousal (RSA); Mosher (2011)], and narrative engagement or transportation [The Transport Narrative Questionnaire, Green and Brock (2013)]. 69 Spanish participants were allocated into three different groups: 25 sighted participants who watched and heard the porn scenes in their audio-visual version (AV); 22 sighted participants who listened to the audio described version without images (AD); and 22 visually impaired participants who also listened to the audio described version without images (ONCE). Overall, results on physiological and self-report measures revealed no significant differences between groups or different versions of the clips. The analysis of cortisol reactivity to porn as the maximum increase or decrease in cortisol (t+12) with respect to baseline values (t-20) revealed no significant differences between the groups, but pointed to a higher percentage of non-responders than responders in the three groups, the highest being found in the ONCE group. As for participants' cardiac response to the clips, no significant differences were found across the groups, with the highest HR levels being registered in the baseline phase. Self-report measures revealed significant between-group differences in negative affect. The ONCE group displayed the highest pre-task levels of negative affect and was the only group that showed a decrease in negative affect after exposure to the clips. Sighted and visually impaired participants reported to be moderately aroused and immersed in the films, regardless of exposure to AV or AD porn. In addition, correlations found between participants' levels of self-report sexual arousal and transportation and post-task affect pointed to a positive relationship between exposure to porn and perceived levels of sexual arousal and affect. Results from the study reflected the efficacy of audio description in providing sighted and visually impaired audiences with a similar experience to that offered by original AV porn scenes. This study is exploratory but provides valid, initial groundwork for further research on the impact of audio description on porn reception., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2021 Rojo López, Ramos Caro and Espín López.)

Audio descriptions (ADs) can increase access to videos for blind people. Researchers have explored different mechanisms for generating ADs, with some of the most recent studies involving paid novices; to improve the quality of their ADs, novices receive feedback from reviewers. However, reviewer feedback is not instantaneous. To explore the potential for real-time feedback through automation, in this paper, we analyze 1, 120 comments that 40 sighted novices received from a sighted or a blind reviewer. We find that feedback patterns tend to fall under four themes: (i) Quality ; commenting on different AD quality variables, (ii) Speech Act ; the utterance or speech action that the reviewers used, (iii) Required Action ; the recommended action that the authors should do to improve the AD, and (iv) Guidance ; the additional help that the reviewers gave to help the authors. We discuss which of these patterns could be automated within the review process as design implications for future AD collaborative authoring systems.