Providing Audio Descriptions for Videos

Last updated: 5/21/2025

An audio description is a secondary audio track, or separate version of a video, that verbally describes important visual information within the video, in between the video's native audio.

If a video's native audio does not provide enough gaps for an audio description, an extended audio description may be employed instead. This version of an audio description pauses the video at certain moments in order to make room for the descriptions of important visual information within the video.

Note: Audio descriptions must be captioned. These captions should include speaker identification, so it's clear to learners which captions represent the video and which captions represent the audio description.

Extended audio description in Storyline example (with speaker identification)

Audio descriptions in Storyline

Storyline currently provides limited abilities to sync a video and separate audio tracks:

  • You have to rely on the course player seekbar, rather than video controls embedded in the slide with the video, and...
  • Both the video and audio must begin playing automatically, unprompted by any trigger (as using a Play media trigger will disconnect the media from the course player seekbar)

This means the only way to provide an audio description is in a dedicated slide or layer. So, instead of offering learners a button that will play an audio description via a Play media trigger, offer learners a button that will open a layer, or jump them to a separate slide, wherein the video and the audio description audio will play simultaneously.

With this method, an audio description needn't be achieved through a single audio file — you can instead use multiple audio files, each one placed at the appropriate time in the slide timeline — convenient if you're using Storyline's text-to-speech feature to provide the audio description.

Extended audio descriptions in Storyline

It may be preferable to embed audio description audio in a video, using video production software (e.g., Camtasia or Adobe Premiere), and then include that version of the video in the eCourse as the audio description. The extended audio description example linked further above was achieved in this manner, and in fact, this may be the only way to achieve an extended audio description in Storyline, as attempts to program one using Storyline triggers have run into issues when learners pause, play or scrub the seekbar (which we almost always want them to be able to do).

See also within the Checklist