How Latvia is Making Films Accessible to the Blind

Turning images into words

When a character walks into a room, smiles, and rain begins outside the window, a sighted viewer absorbs these details instantly, without even thinking about it. For a blind or visually impaired person, this information remains inaccessible unless someone translates it into words. This is exactly what audio description does — a technique that narrates a film's visual content aloud, allowing people who cannot see the picture to follow what is happening on screen.

In Latvia, this method is being used to make cinema more accessible to blind and visually impaired audiences. Those who create audio description carefully choose words to describe what a sighted viewer perceives effortlessly — facial expressions, gestures, settings, natural phenomena and other visual details that shape a film's mood and story.

Why it matters

Without this kind of support, part of a film's content would remain inaccessible to blind viewers, since dialogue alone often does not reveal what is happening visually on screen. Audio description fills this gap by adding a narration track that briefly and precisely describes what appears in the frame, without interrupting the film's natural sound and dialogue.

This accessibility solution allows blind and visually impaired people to enjoy cinema just like any other viewer — following characters' emotions, the development of events, and the visual storytelling that would otherwise remain hidden. It represents one of the ways the cultural sector is working to make art accessible to a wider part of society, regardless of people's visual abilities.