Read that last phrase twice, because it’s the whole job. Not everything you can see. The things that carry the story.<\/p>\n
Two jobs live in one credit<\/h2>\n
Description work splits into writing and voicing. On a big title those are different people. On a museum piece, a corporate video or an educational programme, they’re often the same person, and knowing how the script is built makes you better at reading it either way.<\/p>\n
The writer’s constraint is time, and it’s brutal. A describer writing for the Described and Captioned Media Program described the daily reality this way: “Often, I get only a few seconds between the dialogue\/narration to describe a scene; I have to get in and out without stepping on the narrator.” The craft is in what gets cut: “such situations demand the art of word-smithing and use of good judgment; either shorten the description, work it in later, or leave it out altogether.”<\/p>\n
If you’ve done module work where every line is timed to a slide<\/a>, that discipline transfers. You’re reading to a clock somebody else set.<\/p>\n Description has a house style, and it’s remarkably consistent across the organisations that publish guidance. The Description Key<\/a> from the Described and Captioned Media Program sets out the core of it.<\/p>\n Tense and voice are fixed: “Deliver description in present tense, in active voice (e.g., ‘Ted breaks the window,’ is preferable to, ‘The window was broken by Ted.’)” So is the point of view: “Use third-person narrative style to show neutrality and noninterference.”<\/p>\n Judgement stays out of it: “Describe objectively without personal interpretation, censorship, or comment. Descriptive adjectives are important in enhancing a scene, but must not reflect personal view.” Your job isn’t to tell the listener that the moment is tense. It’s to tell them what’s happening so they arrive at tense on their own.<\/p>\n And silence is allowed: “Let pauses or quiet moments pass without a description when appropriate to support the mood. Do not try to fill every pause. Allow atmosphere and background sound to come through.”<\/p>\n Two things surprise people on their first job. The first is that the gaps aren’t always big enough, and the guidelines know it. The W3C’s guidance on describing visual information<\/a> sets out the fallback: “Where pauses in foreground audio are insufficient to allow audio descriptions to convey the sense of the video, extended audio description is provided for all prerecorded video content in synchronized media.” Extended description pauses the picture so the description can finish. It’s a higher standard, it’s used mostly in training and educational video rather than drama, and it changes how you pace a line, because you’re no longer squeezing.<\/p>\n The second surprise is text. Titles, captions, signs, a phone screen, the date stamped on the corner of a scene. The guidance is firm that “all text in the video should be included in the main audio,” which means a chunk of your read is going to be reading, and reading dates, names and locations cleanly without making a meal of them is its own small skill. The overall filter stays the same throughout: “Describe the visual elements that are important to understand what the video is communicating,” and don’t “describe every detail or things that are apparent from the audio.”<\/p>\n \u00a9 The Voice Realm<\/p><\/div>\n This is where voice actors trip. Corporate narration rewards warmth and a bit of sell. Audiobook work rewards character. Description rewards neither, and it doesn’t reward flatness either.<\/p>\n Netflix’s Audio Description Style Guide<\/a> draws the line clearly: “Avoid a monotonous or sing-song delivery. The narrator’s voice must be distinguishable from other voices in the content, but it should not be distracting or over-animated.”<\/p>\n Then it asks for something harder than neutrality: “The delivery of the description should match the volume, pace, emotional tone, and rhythm of the content.” A chase and a funeral get the same objectivity and completely different energy. You’re a second instrument in somebody else’s mix, playing in the same key, never taking the melody.<\/p>\n The Description Key adds the technical floor under that: “Good pronunciation, diction, and enunciation are essential,” and “Give descriptions in complete sentences if possible. If time is severely limited, sentence fragments may be used.” Sentence fragments read badly when you push them like sentences. Learning to land a three-word fragment cleanly in a one second gap is a skill worth practising on purpose.<\/p>\n Descriptions of characters have had a lot of thought put into them in the last few years, and this is a place where a careless read or a careless line lands badly. Netflix’s guidance is specific: “If unable to confirm or if not established in the plot, do not guess or assume racial, ethnic or gender identity. Instead, focus on the characters’ physical attributes.”<\/p>\n It also asks for consistency: “Description should be done consistently for all main and relevant supporting characters that are being described (i.e. do not single out a character because of a specific trait, describe everyone equally).”<\/p>\n If you’re writing as well as reading, that single guideline will shape more of your script than any advice about vocabulary.<\/p>\n Description is mixed into finished content, which means your track has to sit inside someone else’s soundtrack without fighting it. Netflix’s guide describes the balance: “Dip original version mix 6-12 dB, per mixer discretion. AD\/VO audio should be clear and intelligible with the natural presence of OV dialog underneath.”<\/p>\n The recording itself is expected to arrive plain: “VO should sound natural. A good recording will generally need very little processing with EQ and dynamic Compression. Avoid over-processing.” If you’ve been shipping a compressed, EQ’d, radio-ready sound because clients liked it, strip that habit for this work. A mixer wants room to place you.<\/p>\n Quiet matters more than character here. A hum you can live with under a warm commercial read becomes obvious when your voice drops into a gap in a film’s soundtrack.<\/p>\n Description is one of the easiest genres to practise properly on your own, because the raw material is every video you own.<\/p>\n Pick two minutes of something with real gaps in the dialogue. Write descriptions that fit the gaps, timed, not the ones you wish you had room for. Read them aloud against the picture and find out how much you overwrote, because everyone overwrites at first. Then cut a third of the words and do it again.<\/p>\n Record it, mix it under the original at the sort of dip level the guidance describes, and then apply the test that same DCMP describer uses on their own work: “I review my description and soundtrack with an emphasis on listening. I ask myself, ‘Can the soundtrack stand alone?'”<\/p>\n Their advice for people who want to do this work is worth taping to the wall: “Listen to many different describers and examples of description; listen to the writing; listen to the voice quality and delivery.” Streaming platforms make that easy. Turn audio description on in the accessibility settings of anything you’re watching and listen to it as a professional rather than a viewer.<\/p>\n The obvious home is streaming and broadcast, where description is commissioned through localisation and post houses rather than directly by the platform. Beyond that, museums and galleries commission description for exhibits, live theatre companies run described performances, publishers and educational programmes describe learning material, and any organisation that has to meet accessibility standards on its video eventually needs a voice for the description track.<\/p>\n The route in usually runs through the vendors, not the brands. The Audio Description Project maintains a directory of “people and organizations that write, narrate, record, and edit audio description,” which doubles as a map of who is actually working in the field, and its training pages point to courses for learning to write and narrate it.<\/p>\n It helps to know whether your voice fits the brief before you chase it. If you’re still working that out, our guide to matching a voice to the right genre<\/a> is a reasonable place to start, and the stamina side of the job has a lot in common with long-form book narration<\/a>.<\/p>\n Don’t build a montage. One described clip of ninety seconds, mixed properly under the original audio, tells a producer everything: whether you can time a line, whether you disappear into the mix, whether your fragments land. Two clips with different moods is better than eight with the same one.<\/p>\n Include the original audio in the demo. A dry description read with no picture and no soundtrack behind it proves nothing about the only skill the job is testing.<\/p>\n Description work rewards a particular kind of person, and the describer quoted above named the type better than any job ad could: “If you’re like me and like to problem solve on a minute scale, play with words, and can listen with your eyes, then you’ll enjoy being an audio describer.”<\/p>\n It’s careful, unglamorous, useful work, and it’s read by someone who can’t see the screen and is relying on you completely. Not many voice jobs can say that.<\/p>\n Sources: W3C Web Accessibility Initiative, “Audio Description of Visual Information”; American Council of the Blind Audio Description Project, “Audio Description FAQs”; Described and Captioned Media Program, “Description Key: How to Describe” and “A Day in the Life of an Audio Describer”; Netflix Partner Help Center, “Audio Description Style Guide v2.5”. All accessed 25 September 2026.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The voice-over genre written into accessibility standards, what the read asks for, the published rules, and how to practise it without a client.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":5107,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[154,213],"tags":[559,558,560,544,74,61],"class_list":["post-5106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-find-voice-over-jobs","category-narration-voice-over","tag-accessibility","tag-audio-description","tag-describer","tag-narration","tag-voice-acting","tag-voice-over-jobs"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\tThe rules the writing follows<\/h2>\n
Standard description, extended description, and on-screen text<\/h2>\n
![\"Infographic:](\"https:\/\/www.thevoicerealm.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/info-ad.png\")
How the read differs from narration you’ve done before<\/h2>\n
Describing people without guessing<\/h2>\n
What the mix expects from your recording<\/h2>\n
How to practise this week, with no client<\/h2>\n
Where the work sits, and who hires for it<\/h2>\n
What goes on the reel<\/h2>\n
The quiet appeal of it<\/h2>\n