TO THE UNINITIATED, “cinema for the blind” sounds like an oxymoron, but the term may soon become a permanent fixture at every multiplex in the country. Last week the Film Council committed £500,000 of lottery cash to improving cinema access for blind and partially sighted people through audio description, and for the deaf and hard of hearing through subtitling. The council hopes that with matching funding from exhibitors like Odeon, UGC and Warner Village one in ten of the UK’s 750 cinemas will eventually offer both facilities.

The Royal National Institute for the Blind has welcomed the initiative and believes that Audio Description can do a lot to lessen the social exclusion suffered by the UK’s two million visually impaired people, of whom about 80,000 are totally blind.

“Before audio description, visually impaired people have either felt they can’t go to the cinema,” says Joan Greening, the RNIB’s Broadcasting and talking images officer, “or they have gone with friends who describe the film to them and usually get shouted at by other members of the audience.” The latest infra-red audio description technology, which beams a pre-recorded commentary to cordless headphones issued to ticket buyers at no extra cost, enables visually impaired cinemagoers to enjoy blockbusters without relying on amateurish live description or disturbing their neighbours.

“This is brilliant, because they can see the film on its opening weekend,” says Greening. “If they have to wait six months for the video they can’t talk about the film at the same time as their mates, so they’re excluded yet again.”

Audio description was developed in 1994 for television programmes and is also available on an increasing number of videos and DVDs. Its use in cinemas began to take off with the release of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone a year ago. It has grown thanks to a trial run by Digital Theatre Systems who have installed audio description equipment in one screen at a dozen cinemas across the UK (their combined audio and subtitling system costs £12,500 per screen). Distributors such as Twentieth Century Fox and Warner Brothers have financed the writing and recording of commentaries for about 30 new releases, including Signs, Road to Perdition and Die Another Day. So how do you describe a Bond movie to someone who can see little or nothing of what 007 is up to? I used audio description with Die Another Day at a Warner Village multiplex in North London last Saturday and can report that, for a sighted viewer watching with eyes closed, it felt like a cross between a play on radio and an exceptionally eloquent sports commentary.

Written and recorded by the London-based company ITFC and delivered in clipped Scots tones by one of its three co-writers, James O’Hara, a former BBC newsreader, the Die Another Day commentary likens the pyrotechnics of the opening credits sequence to “shafts of light like surges of electricity” and when Halle Berry emerges from the surf you learn that “her orange bikini top reveals her ample cleavage”.

The descriptions of the numerous fights and chases are timed to one twenty-fourth of a second (the duration of a single frame of film) and clearly map what directors call the “geography” of each sequence, often pinpointing the action by describing a stunt just before or just after it occurs on screen.

Listened to with eyes open, the system’s inherent limitations become apparent. There is often insufficient time to do justice to settings shown only briefly (reference to “the cigar factory” when Bond visits Havana leaves the listener unaware that Pierce Brosnan is walking past rows of Cuban women rolling tobacco on their thighs). More importantly, because O’Hara cannot talk at the same time as the actors, he sometimes has to ignore visual jokes or byplay between characters that runs underneath the dialogue.

But these are fairly minor reservations. What Audio Description needs now to complement first-rate writing and technology is better publicity. At the Finchley Road Warner Village, staff have been issuing headphones only three or four times a month — hardly surprising, given that neither the cinema’s recorded information line nor its newspaper and magazine listings advertise the system.

The Cinema Exhibitors Association deserves credit for setting up the joint working group behind the Film Council initiative, but if the association’s members want their laudable commitment to greater access to yield even higher ticket and popcorn sales (UK cinema admissions are already running at a 30-year high), they should start by improving their press listings, and adding “For Audio Description, press 9” to the telephone recordings that are the most accessible source of programme information for blind or partially sighted patrons.

Once Audio Description is both widely available and widely publicised there will be many more stories like the one Joan Greening heard recently. “A woman from Cardiff told me she had taken her sighted children to the first Harry Potter film but her eight-year-old, blind son had missed out. Then she found out about Audio Description and the boy was able to go to The Chamber of Secrets with his brothers and sisters and enjoy it as much as they did.”

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