The conversation around the use of text-to-speech audio description has been inflamed recently as certain streaming services and film distribution companies have turned to their top tier branded content, replacing human audio description performers with synthetic, non-human voices replicating the human vibe, but still unable to deliver a human performance. This isn’t terribly shocking, since we seem to be a brad crumb society, patiently waiting for, and accepting the scraps given to us.

Aside from the disability centric ReelAbilities, there isn’t a single streaming service that is 100% accessible, nor is there a network or cable channel offering 24/7 audio description. we never bridged the gap fully, and our friends and families still have to decide how to watch films and shows with us, when they don’t have audio description. There are obvious distribution gaps, where you could take a title with professionally made audio description, and send it to every service, but somehow it would not be available on all of them with the audio description track.Somehow, the gaps continue to exist.

I heard a panel a few years ago with a bunch of reps from every major streamer touting how they would love to share audio description tracks, but that seems to lack the actual proof on paper needed. How can we expect a company complicit in creating new content with no accessibility to take our conversation on human audio description seriously? If we are barely a footnote, then how do we push back?

It doesn’t help that we live in a time when people are running from the perception that they are interested in diversity, equity, and inclusivity, so having those conversations in 2026 is a larger struggle than it once was before disabled people joined trans athletes and several ethnic groups as the reasons things in this country are broken. It’s really a eugenic tactic replicated out of the Nazi propaganda of Hitler, who denigrated the disabled population, removing them from society regardless of ethnicity. First they came for… me. They snapped up the disabled community, and that alone didn’t raise alarm. Had it, and Germany rose up to protect their disabled community, things would probably have been very different. But since we make people uncomfortable, when we aren’t busy inspiring others simply by bravely existing, we are far down the food chain of priority. That’s why we have no substantial legislation forcing studios and streamers to adhere to mandatory audio description, and a standard of quality with which to provide. We don’t hold the cards. We hold the Jokers in a game that does not require them, to give us the feeling we have a voice.

Today, I noticed a blind individual on a forum come in hot with his retort to those who oppose tTS. How can we possibly oppose text-to-speech and AI audio description if we in turn use apps on our phones that would read something to us, like cooking instructions on a package of food, or the address on the mail we received, or even let us know if we picked out the blue or black tie. He truly believed this was his grand Aha moment.

For this to come from a blind individual is asinine. To equate necessary functionality with entertainment signaled to me that this person couldn’t tell the difference between work and fun. If you use a microwave for convenience, and I tell you now you will use the microwave for everything all the time, because you are comfortable using it to fix one thing, then I’m looking at a very myopic view of how you live your life.

If sighted people, who watch movies, instead of having a cinematic quality to their films and television, instead had things presented to them in a work or functional mode, like educational or training videos, or like the nightly news programs, then the entertainment value would be lost. No more cinemas, no 4K, no more hundreds of millions on visual effects. Strip it down so your movie has the same budget as the training video you watched in orientation, I would think sighted people would wonder what was up with the industry. Well, after all, if you have to watch functional videos, to either fill the void and learn how to perform a task, or disseminate information, that is a lot like how someone would use an app to give them temporary access to text they cannot see. It does not suggest as a byproduct that either sighted people want everything to be a How-To tutorial, or that blind people want everything to sound like the voice that told me what the expiration date on my milk was.

Making high quality audio description, all the time, should be an unprompted affair. Someone should just want everything they produce with their name on it to always be the best it can be, and yet, somehow, they don’t. Perhaps this is a greater signal of how each of these companies are struggling. If you’re willing to cut costs in one area that diminish your product, why wouldn’t you do it again and again?

I hate to be the broken record, but text-to-speech cannot match human narrators. What is worse, is that audio description houses are being forced into cutting humans from the process by being underquoted and underfunded by these companies.If you tell Disney the track costs 10K, and give them itemized reasoning for the package, then they can choose what to eliminate. Narrator? QC? Writer? Engineer? Where does it stop? And these companies are rock and a hard placing it right now, as if they can bend over for the time being, it can keep the jobs of a few humans. First they came for the narrators, and I said nothing, because I was not a narrator.

The strangest thing for me in this is I wasn’t the guy who was fully anti-text to speech. I saw it as a way to boost libraries fast. The realist in me says we don’t get to 100% audio description on any service without text to speech, because we are so far behind. But, in that, all of these services have older content, lesser known product, which should be the fodder. Netflix was using it to give us random International programs, which previously didn’t have audio description. Since Netflix feels comfortable with the fact that their Best Picture nominee Roma has no English Audio Description, I see this as a positive change, as it allows Netflix to see that blind people would be interested in world cinema and television, if only granted accessibility. Perhaps, after the experiment, we’ll get more human tracks on International shows and films like Squid Game and All Quiet On The Western Front.

But when I see companies tossing text to speech on brand new, English language content, and onto shows whose first season had human audio description, that’s when we have to take the keys away. We’ve let our children believe they can take the car whenever they want, and now they’re doing 110 in a 45 while under the influence. Now, I ahve to be the guy who says you cannot be trusted to use text to speech in any meaningful capacity, so the answer now is No. Take the keys. You’re grounded.

The absolute audacity to suggest that because blind people use AI, or text-to-speech in functional capacity to perform tasks in our day, and therefore we should be complicit in text to speech proliferating films and television is the dumbest attempt at shaming us into subjugation.

I say this with all the privilege in the world. I come from the sighted world. I know how those fuckers work. They don’t think about accessibility they do not use, and do not understand. But, what they do understand, is a work/life balance, the difference between work and entertainment. Everytime a company chooses a synthetic voice that just told me the public toilet I’m standing in front of has shit all over it, and has that voice describe the new episode of X-Men 97, it shows a fundamental lack of understanding of what we want, what we need, and what we deserve as a consumer block that is paying for your product. Frankly, I’m tired of being treated as an inconvenience for daring to be your customer, and being dropped into second class territory by a corporation for no other reason than apathy and greed, is not just frustrating, it is offensive.

Every time you choose to not make a track, or ask how little you can spend on our experience, you send the not too subtle messsage that your life would be much easier if we’d fuck right off, and that is also a rather eugenic proposition. Life would just be swell if we didn’t have to worry about accessibility wouldn’t it? Maybe for you, since you don’t need it. But for us?

And as someone who once danced in the world of the sighted, all of you are playing with fire. I didn’t have blind on my bingo card. Perhaps, instead of working so hard to make the accessibility everyone gets minimalist, think of what you might want as a safety net already in place, should something happen to you or someone you love. Otherwise, you’re in for a rude awakening when you’ve invested your life into racing audio description to the bottom, when the doctor tells you your son was born blind, and now the full circle moment arrives. Now, you have to scramble to advocate for the very thing you’ve spent so long trying to destroy.

So, no. I know this is shocking, but we’d much rather have a human voice than the robot voice we use for Siri on our phones. In other news, the sky is blue, and the earth is round. That sums up things I shouldn’t have to explain today.