A track for blind audiences gets made at the end of the line, by people the filmmaker rarely meets. On over a third of the titles we have on record, the voice isn’t a person. theADNA.org puts both on the record.
Update, October 5, 2026: The Audio Description Project at the American Council of the Blind announced the directory: https://adp.acb.org/announcing-database-ad-credits
A friend in arts funding clicked around theADNA.org while we talked, and asked “Who’s the audience? I want to share this. Who am I sharing it with?”
I’ve run the site for ten years. I didn’t have a one-sentence answer.
Thirty minutes later, he said, “It looks like a solution to a problem we didn’t know we had.”
He’s right that the problem comes first.
How Audio Description Gets Made
A production company spends years and millions of dollars on a film.
It sells the film to a distributor: a streaming service or a network.
The distributor hires an Audio Description facility.
The facility hires the team: a writer, a performer, an engineer, and quality control, often blind professionals.
The track ships near the end of the process.
I talk with producers and directors, including through the Television Academy. Most of them don’t know their film has Audio Description. Fewer know who made it. Fewer still have heard it.
The Streamers Built The Road
The streaming services built a highway where there wasn’t one. The Audio Description Project lists more than 15,000 titles with Audio Description, and much of that growth came through streaming.
They pay for it, too. A distributor moving hundreds of titles pays for every track, on a budget the film’s production never planned.
Synthetic voice is one way they cover that volume. I understand why it’s there. Blind audiences get titles that might otherwise ship without a track.
The conundrum is that the people paying for access choose the voice. The people who made the film aren’t there, or maybe aren’t aware.
Where The Names Fall Off
Audio Description credits usually play at the end of the audio track. Streaming services sometimes skip the end credits, and count down to the next episode’s autoplay. A blind viewer who wants to hear the credit has to beat the autoplay first.
And on some tracks, the credit isn’t there at all.
So the names fall off at both ends. The filmmaker doesn’t know who voiced their film for blind audiences. The blind audience can’t find out either.
I started theADNA.org after hundreds of my own credits came down from a website. I told that story in The Names Behind The Track. Because my voice was heard, I got the questions about the writing, the mix, and the timing. Most of those answers belonged to someone else on the team.
The Number I Keep Coming Back To
theADNA.org now has a Synthetic Text-to-Speech Voice Tracker. It counts titles where software reads the script instead of a human performer.
On October 2, 2026, it listed 3,021 titles with a synthetic voice and 5,957 with a human performer. That’s 35% of the titles on record.
It’s a count of what’s been reported, not of every title with Audio Description.
Most of the synthetic credits came from one industry contributor, and many haven’t been checked against on-screen credits yet. The share could move either way as more credits come in.
I kept the tracker neutral on purpose. People who like synthetic voice and people who don’t can cite the same numbers.
What A Filmmaker Should Know
Here’s where I have a point of view (it’s mine, not the directory’s).
If you spent years on a film, your blind audience hears it through a track you’ve probably never heard.
A writer chose which details to name and which to leave out.
A performer (or software) chose the tone and intention.
A facility cast that voice, usually without your casting choices in the brief.
My view: synthetic voice scales information. In storytelling, it doesn’t carry intent.
A filmmaker can’t weigh that without knowing the track exists.
Now they can look it up.
And a producer who asks “who’s on our Audio Description track?” before the deal closes changes what gets made.
Who It's For
- Blind and low vision audiences who liked a track and want to know who wrote or performed it, and what else that person made.
- The people who make Audio Description. Right now they’re the largest group of users. Many had no public record of their work.
- Facilities and distributors hiring writers, performers, and quality control.
- Filmmakers checking their own titles.
What It Doesn't Cover
theADNA.org is film and TV only. Live theater, dance, and touring shows run differently. The local venue usually provides the Audio Description, and the voice changes from city to city.
A record like this would help that field too. Could theater presenters ask whether a touring show should travel with its own Audio Description voice, the way it travels with its cast? I’d like to hear that answer.