Describing Visual Elements
A powerful aspect of videos is their wealth of nonverbal communication. Images can convey much, and minutes can pass without any words being spoken. Unfortunately, this excludes someone with a visual impairment from receiving information that is conveyed only visually.
Audio description provides a description of visual or nonverbal information in videos. Similarly to alternative text on images, audio description states for the listener any important visual information that they may miss from a video. This can be time-consuming and expensive to accommodate after the fact, so it is best to minimize the need for audio description during the recording of any video.