By Bolarinwa Akande
Dubai-based aircraft carrier, Emirates Airline, has introduced an Audio Description on movies for visually impaired customers on its in-flight entertainment system, information, communication and entertainment (ICE) Digital Widescreen.
This is the first time in the history of air travels, that such innovation is being introduced.
The feat, further confirms the airline as global brand, with Emirates’ ICE, recently awarded the ‘World’s Best Airline In-flight Entertainment’ award at the SKYTRAX World Airline Awards for the 10th consecutive year.
The airline now offers Audio Description soundtracks on 16 Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures films, including Frozen, Saving Mr. Banks, Cars 2, Monsters University, Marvel’s The Avengers, Toy Story 3 and all four Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
Audio Description, increasingly common in cinemas and TV, is a recorded narration explaining the scene during the gaps in dialogue, while the film soundtrack continues at its normal pace.
“Our focus is not just the depth and diversity of our on-board entertainment, but also relevance. Making entertainment accessible to our diverse customers is very important to us. It was our motivation to introduce movies that can be enjoyed by customers with visual difficulties. Our greatest satisfaction comes from delivering an exceptional customer experience, which we hope our constant innovation fulfils. In future, we want to add more content with Audio Description, so visually impaired passengers can be entertained with an even wider choice of contents when flying with us,” said Patrick Brannelly, Emirates’ Vice President, Corporate Communications Product, Publishing, Digital & Events.
Emirates’ award-winning ice Digital Widescreen offers a staggering choice of over 1,800 channels of entertainment, including over 400 movies from around the world, hundreds of hours of TV and thousands of hours of music from contemporary to classical.
In 2007, Emirates also worked with Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures to introduce Closed Captions, the technology used by the hard of hearing, for the first time in in-flight entertainment. It also involves showing the actors’ dialogues in subtitles and references to sound effects used in the movie.
According to her, the ICE Digital Widescreen this month will offer over 50 movies with Closed Captions.