Crossing The Pond: A Deep Dive Into UK And US Audio Description

By Marie Campbell, AD Excellence Lead

It did not start, as the song goes, with a kiss, but with a rather less subtle, but in its own way poetic, “hickey from Kenickie”.  When I first heard that phrase in the movie, Grease, I remember the thrill of learning a new exotic-sounding word for what we Brits rather prosaically called “a love-bite”. In an international hybrid language like English, there is something deeply satisfying about all the different flavours, where boring old “traffic cones” in the UK and US can be the wonderfully descriptive “witches’ hats” in Australia.

I’ve been thinking about the differences – and similarities – in English-language audio description (AD) a lot, mainly because I heard a few old assumptions recently at an international conference: that British AD always over-interprets emotions and “force-names” characters, and American AD is generally more “objective” (that most loaded of words). It chimed with my own once-held prejudices, that American AD wouldn’t say “He smiles” but would have “He creases his eyes and turns up the corners of his mouth”. How wordy, I thought! I’ve trained describers in the US, UK and Australia, so I’m more familiar with the different flavours of AD. And I recently voted on the EGA Hermes Awards, an international peer-reviewed competition for AD creators, so it feels like the perfect time to take a deep dive into what the differences really are.

What’s brilliant is that with global on-demand streaming, we can now listen to each other and have more informed discussions, rather than repeating the flawed assumptions of old. But there is one caveat: AD, be it British or American, is not written to a single standard – there’s no “British AD Bible” or its American equivalent, so there will be differences even within the same conventions and styles of a given country, but for the purposes of exploring language, I’ll use British and (North) American in the broadest sense. So, let’s get into the nitty-gritty and break down AD writing and narration in the two main flavours of English.

Exploring Grammatical Nuances

For me, as a describer, a noticeable difference in the script is, grammatically, American AD leans into a subject-then-verb sentence construction, with the verb almost exclusively in the simple-present tense: so in the opening chase of The Handmaid’s Tale, “They hide down a slope at the base of some trees”, in British AD, might be, “They’re hiding down a slope at the base of some trees”, particularly if the description comes after the action has audibly taken place. Generally, we use the present-continuous tense to show that an action is ongoing in the present. Varying the two present tenses can give a writer more options and can lead to better flow for the narrator, and flow is useful when it comes to keeping a vocal delivery engaging and varied. That said, there is a simple clarity that comes with using a single tense, and it potentially avoids overly complex sentence constructions, which are tempting to write to maximise access but harder to follow for the audience.

Another difference in style is that British AD uses the “-ing” form of the verb to describe the ubiquitous interstitial shots that make up all content. For example, “Flying over a patchwork of fields towards an old stone church on the horizon…” gives the impression of what the camera is doing without mentioning the artifice. All TV is a series of camera shots, and the more immersive we make the experience for the AD audience, the better. In US AD, because of the preference for subject-then-verb, I recently heard, “A view travels down a city street at night”. It’s clear what’s meant but describing something abstract actively doing something might take you out of the moment. British AD might say “Travelling down a city street at night…” but the narrator’s delivery would come down at the end to indicate there’s no subject coming after – it’s just an impressionistic representation of a point of view.

Best Practice for Presenting Character Names

Another commonly cited difference is what Americans call “force-naming” and we call “naming in advance”, where a describer reveals a character’s name ahead of the content itself. It might be assumed this is “a British AD thing” but having heard North American and Australian describers on this topic recently, I think it’s more of a pragmatic describer thing, an editorial tool in our toolbox. Sometimes names aren’t revealed in dialogue until late on. Sighted people have who’s who constantly reinforced twice over, by seeing and hearing them, so if someone’s name or identity isn’t a secret, describers will occasionally name in advance to help clarify who’s who for the AD audience because it improves access. Prescriptively refusing to name can potentially shortchange the audience or even impede access. The opening titles for Season 2 of Severance have a wonderfully creative animated sequence, where the main character, Mark, travels across a surreal landscape laden with symbolism and imagery from the show, but for the AD audience he’s just “a/the man in red”. The refusal to name might make sense for episode 1, when no-one knows anything, but to doggedly refuse to name the main character in the opening titles for two whole seasons means the AD audience is missing a key component that sighted people can take for granted. Conversely, I heard the opposite approach in the American AD for the movie A Real Pain, where the two leads were described physically and then named in advance. It worked because it avoided the potentially clunky phrasing that comes with having to repeatedly differentiate between two men with brown hair and it also cemented the two leads in the minds of the audience from the start.

Mastering the Art of Effectively Describing Characters’ Emotions

Another common assumption is that British AD (over)interprets emotions, but American AD never does. Over the years, I think we’ve become more aligned here. Nowadays, British AD and American AD interprets to clear up ambiguity (is someone smiling sarcastically or sadly?) or when the visuals are clearly unambiguous. In the American AD for The Acolyte, I heard, “[He] pauses, overcome with grief”, a pithy phrase that succinctly summed up the visuals in a tight gap, despite being, strictly speaking, interpretative (how do we know he’s overcome with grief? Maybe he’s just sad, or overwhelmed, or has indigestion?!). All perception is subjective, so the notion of “the objective audio describer” is false. The skill of the describer is to find the editorial balance between the subjective and objective to maximise access to the content without patronising or spoon-feeding the audience.

Stylistically, both British and American AD use the active voice (where a subject performs an action) but in American AD, the passive voice (where a subject is acted upon) is avoided. For example, if a dog is hot on the heels of a cat racing down an alley, American AD might say, “A dog chases a cat down an alley”. In the UK, we might use the same description, but if the focus (and therefore the subject) then changes, we might change to a passive voice: The cat’s chased over a wall and into a garden”. In other words, if the dog’s no longer in vision, we flex the language to avoid mentioning it as it’s no longer a subject in a visual or AD sense.

The Impact of the Narrator’s Voice

But what about the actual voice? North American AD often uses voice actors to narrate AD scripts written by others. Historically, the resulting vocal delivery could occasionally – to my ear – sound a bit flat. I think that’s because some narrators were adhering to a safer, more neutral delivery at the expense of some engagement and flavour. The subject-then-verb construction could also make a varied delivery harder. This can happen in British AD, too, and one of the things we train early on is getting the right balance between “neutral but engaged”, a sliding scale that depends on the content being described. British AD is usually voiced by audio describers, who also write AD scripts, so they understand how to narrate at a more granular level because they’re also used to writing scripts for themselves and others. Overall, though, I’d say American and British AD narrators have become more aligned in their vocal engagement, perhaps in relation to changing audience tastes, or maybe to differentiate themselves from lifelike synthetic voices.

The Role of Different Accents

A final difference between American and British AD voices is with accents: the US tends towards a non-regional American, whereas the UK, because of its rich history in public service broadcasting, represents different British accents on-air more prominently. That said, American AD, with its voice-actor narrators, can tailor their casting to be more representative of the content when required.

Diving into the minutiae of AD is fun, but it might suggest there’s a huge divide across the Pond. However, for me, the opposite is true. AD audiences, like AD practitioners, might prefer what they’re used to, but tastes are constantly evolving along with more and more international content. The best British and North American AD creators have adapted to changing times, content and audience expectations, most recently around describing diversity, which is essential not just for access but also for representation and visibility.

The best style guides will give you the basics but avoid being overly prescriptive because AD isn’t transactional: ten different writers will produce ten different scripts. So understanding what high-quality accessibility looks like, particularly in this age of AI and automation, has never felt more important. This year’s EGA Hermes Awards has exemplified why quality shines through regardless of its origins. Listening to the American AD on Dune Part 2, Maria or Bridgerton, I recognised they’d been created by talented describers. So, for me, the Pond isn’t something that divides us; it’s something that shimmers with small ripples of difference, but which shines bright as a reflection of our craft.