Assessment for audio description training in Hong Kong: perspectives and criteria

Quality assessment is essential in audio description (AD) training. It is important for trainers and trainees of AD, who are mostly sighted, to understand the needs of people who are visually impaired, usually the end users of the AD products. The sighted people’s perspective is also important, as they can compare the AD with the visual contents and decide whether the description is accurate. Therefore, in AD assessment, it would be ideal to have a team of evaluators consisting of both sighted and VI people. So far it is unclear how evaluators who are sighted, and who are visually impaired perceive AD criteria differently. It is worthwhile to study the feedback from both groups to refine the quality assessment of AD. The researchers used the film AD clips from 29 students in a university translation programme in Hong Kong for the evaluation task. Two groups of evaluators were invited to grade and discuss the assessment criteria, three of them are visually impaired and three sighted. The evaluators listened to each student’s performance, discussed in their respective group and decided on the comments together. Detailed criteria were generated based on discussion, and discrepancies between the two groups were identified. © 2025 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.