Films with audio description
Every film here carries an audio track that says what is on screen, so a blind or low-vision viewer can follow it by ear. Free to watch, no account, no advertising.
13 films described, 12 of them captioned. The description is on the film’s own audio track, so there is nothing to switch on: open one and press play. Every title also has its own page, which carries the same player, the synopsis and the rights working.
The films
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The Amazing Mr. X (1948)
388 description cues, written and recorded here.
Listen to The Amazing Mr. X (1948) here
Sound only — 144 MB rather than 606 MB. Everything the described master says, without the picture.
A page you can send somebody — it plays the soundtrack and says how to give notes.
Or watch it with the picture:
The Amazing Mr. X (1948) without description is here too, if you would rather have the original sound alone.
Caption file for The Amazing Mr. X (1948) (WebVTT) · Why The Amazing Mr. X (1948) is free to publish
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The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962)
291 description cues, written and recorded here.
Listen to The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962) here
The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962) without description is here too, if you would rather have the original sound alone.
Caption file for The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962) (WebVTT) · Why The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962) is free to publish
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Century 21 Calling (1962)
65 description cues, written and recorded here.
Listen to Century 21 Calling (1962) here
Sound only — 26 MB rather than 410 MB. Everything the described master says, without the picture.
A page you can send somebody — it plays the soundtrack and says how to give notes.
Or watch it with the picture:
Century 21 Calling (1962) without description is here too, if you would rather have the original sound alone.
Caption file for Century 21 Calling (1962) (WebVTT) · Why Century 21 Calling (1962) is free to publish
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Design for Dreaming (1956)
66 description cues, written and recorded here.
Listen to Design for Dreaming (1956) here
Sound only — 17 MB rather than 746 MB. Everything the described master says, without the picture.
A page you can send somebody — it plays the soundtrack and says how to give notes.
Or watch it with the picture:
Design for Dreaming (1956) without description is here too, if you would rather have the original sound alone.
Caption file for Design for Dreaming (1956) (WebVTT) · Why Design for Dreaming (1956) is free to publish
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The Great Train Robbery (1903)
111 description cues, written and recorded here.
Listen to The Great Train Robbery (1903) here
Sound only — 20 MB rather than 347 MB. Everything the described master says, without the picture.
A page you can send somebody — it plays the soundtrack and says how to give notes.
Or watch it with the picture:
The Great Train Robbery (1903) without description is here too, if you would rather have the original sound alone.
Caption file for The Great Train Robbery (1903) (WebVTT) · Why The Great Train Robbery (1903) is free to publish
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Habit Patterns (1954)
29 description cues, written and recorded here.
Listen to Habit Patterns (1954) here
Sound only — 26 MB rather than 102 MB. Everything the described master says, without the picture.
A page you can send somebody — it plays the soundtrack and says how to give notes.
Or watch it with the picture:
Habit Patterns (1954) without description is here too, if you would rather have the original sound alone.
Caption file for Habit Patterns (1954) (WebVTT) · Why Habit Patterns (1954) is free to publish
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The Home Economics Story (1951)
74 description cues, written and recorded here.
Listen to The Home Economics Story (1951) here
Sound only — 48 MB rather than 280 MB. Everything the described master says, without the picture.
A page you can send somebody — it plays the soundtrack and says how to give notes.
Or watch it with the picture:
The Home Economics Story (1951) without description is here too, if you would rather have the original sound alone.
Caption file for The Home Economics Story (1951) (WebVTT) · Why The Home Economics Story (1951) is free to publish
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Inner Sanctum (1948)
215 description cues, written and recorded here.
Listen to Inner Sanctum (1948) here
Sound only — 120 MB rather than 795 MB. Everything the described master says, without the picture.
A page you can send somebody — it plays the soundtrack and says how to give notes.
Or watch it with the picture:
Inner Sanctum (1948) without description is here too, if you would rather have the original sound alone.
Caption file for Inner Sanctum (1948) (WebVTT) · Why Inner Sanctum (1948) is free to publish
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The Killer Shrews (1959)
210 description cues, written and recorded here.
Listen to The Killer Shrews (1959) here
The Killer Shrews (1959) without description is here too, if you would rather have the original sound alone.
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The Little Shop of Horrors (1960)
303 description cues, written and recorded here.
Listen to The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) here
Sound only — 131 MB rather than 2.6 GB. Everything the described master says, without the picture.
A page you can send somebody — it plays the soundtrack and says how to give notes.
Or watch it with the picture:
The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) without description is here too, if you would rather have the original sound alone.
Caption file for The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) (WebVTT) · Why The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) is free to publish
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Mr. B Natural (1956)
67 description cues, written and recorded here.
Listen to Mr. B Natural (1956) here
Sound only — 49 MB rather than 290 MB. Everything the described master says, without the picture.
A page you can send somebody — it plays the soundtrack and says how to give notes.
Or watch it with the picture:
Mr. B Natural (1956) without description is here too, if you would rather have the original sound alone.
Caption file for Mr. B Natural (1956) (WebVTT) · Why Mr. B Natural (1956) is free to publish
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Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Description written and recorded here.
Listen to Night of the Living Dead (1968) here
Sound only — 183 MB rather than 2.3 GB. Everything the described master says, without the picture.
A page you can send somebody — it plays the soundtrack and says how to give notes.
Or watch it with the picture:
Night of the Living Dead (1968) without description is here too, if you would rather have the original sound alone.
Caption file for Night of the Living Dead (1968) (WebVTT) · Why Night of the Living Dead (1968) is free to publish
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One Week (1920)
183 description cues, written and recorded here.
Listen to One Week (1920) here
Sound only — 43 MB rather than 474 MB. Everything the described master says, without the picture.
A page you can send somebody — it plays the soundtrack and says how to give notes.
Or watch it with the picture:
One Week (1920) without description is here too, if you would rather have the original sound alone.
Caption file for One Week (1920) (WebVTT) · Why One Week (1920) is free to publish
What audio description is
A second narrator, speaking in the gaps between the dialogue, saying what is happening on screen. Who has walked into the room. What the note says. That the man behind her has a knife. It is the information a sighted viewer gets for free from the picture, and without it a film is a soundtrack with holes in it.
It is not narration over the top of the film, and it is not a summary. It fits in the pauses the film already has, which is most of the craft: a description that talks over a line of dialogue has taken away more than it gave.
Two flavors exist. Standard description fits the existing pauses. Extended description pauses the film to make room, which is possible only where the player supports it. Everything here is standard description, mixed into the film’s own audio.
Who it is for
Around 2.2 billion people live with a vision impairment of some kind, and description is the difference between a film being available and a film being watchable. But the audience is wider than that in practice: it is used by people listening rather than watching, by people with cognitive disabilities who find the extra signal helps, by teachers who need the visual content spoken aloud, and by anybody who has ever had a film on while doing something else.
Horror is the genre it is missing from most. Almost no horror has ever been described — the genre carries more of its meaning in the picture than most, which makes it both the hardest to describe and the worst to be locked out of. No indie wrestling has been described at all.
How to turn it on
Here: nothing to turn on. The description is mixed into the film’s own audio track, so pressing play is the whole of it. Where an undescribed print of the same film exists, it is linked beside it above, so you can choose.
We do it this way deliberately. A second audio track inside an MP4 is not reliably exposed by browsers — some show a track picker, most do not — so a described track hidden behind a control that may not appear is a track nobody hears. Two files is less elegant and it works everywhere.
Elsewhere, the control is usually in the audio menu rather than the subtitle menu, and it is usually called “Audio Description”, “AD” or “English – Audio Description”. On a television it is often a system-wide setting rather than a per-app one: look for Accessibility → Audio Description or Video Description in the set’s own menus, which then applies to every app that supports it.
What the standards actually say
Written out because it is routinely got wrong, including by people selling accessibility work.
- WCAG 2.2, success criterion 1.2.3 (Level A) is met by audio description or a full text alternative. 1.2.5 (Level AA) requires audio description itself, with no text alternative accepted in its place. That is the criterion a described film meets and an undescribed one cannot.
- 47 CFR 79.3 is the FCC’s audio description rule, and it does not apply to websites. It binds a “video programming distributor”, which §79.3(a)(5) defines as a licensed television broadcast station, an MVPD, or any other distributor of video programming for residential reception that delivers such programming directly to the home and is subject to the jurisdiction of the Commission. That last clause is the one doing the work, and a website is not it. Anybody telling you a streaming site is “FCC required” to describe has not read the definition.
- 28 CFR 35.200, the Department of Justice’s 2024 web rule, adopts WCAG 2.1 Level A and AA for public entities — from 26 April 2027 for those with a total population of 50,000 or more, and 26 April 2028 for smaller ones and for special district governments of any size, which the rule carves out of the earlier date explicitly. It binds public libraries, state colleges and county systems, and it reaches the content they make available “directly or through contractual, licensing, or other arrangements”. That is the sentence that matters if you are linking to us.
- Section 508 applies to federal agencies and their procurement, via the Access Board’s ICT standards, which adopt WCAG 2.0 AA.
So: no regulation requires this site to describe anything. We do it because it is the point of the site, and because the institutions we work with have a dated legal requirement that our files help them meet.
What makes a description good
The DCMP Description Key sets the bar, and its five principles are the ones we work to: description must be accurate, prioritized, consistent, appropriate and equal. Accurate is first for a reason. A blind viewer cannot check us, so a description that guesses at an object and gets it wrong has not been slightly unhelpful — it has put something in the film that is not there.
Practically, that means: describe what is on screen and never what it means. Present tense, active voice. Read on-screen text word for word rather than summarizing it, and read subtitled speech verbatim. Never say a thing is absent — “her name is never given” is a claim about the whole film that one scene cannot support.
How the description is made
Narration written to the picture and placed in real pauses, located from a word-level transcript rather than a loudness threshold, ducked 6–12 dB against the original and delivered at −16 LUFS. For a silent film it reads the title cards, because on a silent film the cards are the dialogue.
The film is in the public domain, and restoring it gives nobody any new rights over it, including us. These prints are free to take, use and pass on, exactly as they were before we touched them.
The description is a different thing. It is an original script, written to this picture and performed, and it belongs to Always on Top Entertainment LLC. Free to listen to here, for anyone, always — and licensed separately for reuse, because writing description is the work we do for a living.
Questions people actually ask
- Is audio description the same as narration?
- No. Narration is part of the film. Description is added afterwards, sits in the pauses, and says what the picture is doing.
- Is it the same as closed captions?
- No, and they are for different people. Captions put the audio into text for a deaf or hard-of-hearing viewer. Description puts the picture into audio for a blind or low-vision viewer. A film needs both to be fully accessible, and most films have neither.
- Do I need an account or a subscription?
- No. There is no account on this site at all, no payment, and no advertising.
- Can I download the described film?
- The prints are public domain and free to take. The description track is our own original work and is licensed separately — free to listen to here, always, and licensed for reuse. Write and ask; we have never said no to a school or a library.
- Why are there so few described films anywhere?
- Because it is written and performed rather than generated, so it costs real hours per film, and almost nothing in the public domain has a rights holder with a budget to spend on it. That is the gap this exists to fill.
- Can you describe a film for us?
- Yes. That is the business. What we do for institutions.
If you commission description. The same work is available for your own films — description, captions, picture restoration and a conformance report against WCAG, FCC 47 CFR 79 and EN 301 549. What we do for institutions.