Due to no or limited eye sight, blind or visually impaired persons have always been deprived from fully enjoying visual events such as a movie, tell drama, documentary, stage drama and sports event. On the other hand one might think that what the heck that blinded person could gain from a movie or visual medium, but one should not forget the fact that higher percentage of blinded persons has become blind at latter part of their life including myself. So watching a movie, drama or sporting event would probably have been the main form of entertainment of many of them. Thereby, in this scenario, one might get extremely frustrated not being able to get on with his or her most preferred means of entertainment after loosing the sight.
So the concept of “Audio description” has been introduced to movies, stage dramas and sporting events to enhance the amount of auditory information on their visual effects. It is additional narration service for individual who are blind or visually impaired. In audio described films you hear the regular sound track but overlaid with narrators voice in between the lines of dialog and sound effects describing visual details of what’s going on.
In stage dramas, a specially trained individual known as an Audio describer provides description of seen, settings, costumes and body language. It is slip in between dialogs and music. Blind or visually impaired person can listen to the audio description of visual events with the provided head phones while at the same time listening to the on stage dialogs.

In recent past, I was able to enjoy number of audio described films, but all of them are in English. I don’t think any such audio described film or TV program has ever been produced in Sri Lanka for the benefit of the Sri Lankan blind community. Therefore, National Film cooperation and film producers of Sri Lanka should pay their attention to make the audio described sound tracks available of their films and get on with latest development of movie industry. Certainly it wouldn’t cost them much but will take the Sri Lankan movie industry a step ahead.
Watch following you tube video for a sample audio described movie.