Eyeless Technique: Watching Movies Blindly

Summer weekend weather directly encourages you to go to the water with your family or friends, relax from everyday worries and watch a movie or series in the evening. But is it even realistic for people with visual impairments to enjoy films to their full potential? Of course yes.

At the beginning, it is important to mention that many titles can be viewed in their original form, without any description of the plot. For the blind, the information that the individual characters say is often enough to understand. Of course, sometimes it happens that a certain part of the work is more visual and at such a moment users with a visual handicap have a problem, but often these are just details that can be explained by someone who can see. Unfortunately, in recent series and movies, there is less and less talking and a lot of things are clear only visually. But there is a solution even for such titles.

To many films, but also to series, the creators add audio commentaries that describe what is happening on the scene. The description is usually very detailed, from information about who entered the room to a description of the interior or exterior to the facial expressions of individual characters. The creators of the audio commentary try not to overlap the dialogues, because they are usually the most important. Czech Television, for example, tries to create audio commentaries for most films, on a specific device they are turned on in the settings. Of the streaming services, it has literally perfect descriptions for the blind Netflix and quite decent Apple TV+ as well. None of these services, however, have audio commentaries translated into the Czech language. Unfortunately, the biggest problem is that the description is not entirely pleasant for the sighted. Personally, I watch films and series with audio commentary alone or only with blind people, with other friends I usually turn off the commentary so as not to disturb them.

Braille line:

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If you want to watch the work in the original, but foreign languages ​​are not your forte, you can turn on the subtitles. A reading program can read them to a blind person, but in that case the characters cannot be heard, and in addition, it is a rather distracting element. Fortunately, the subtitles can also be read on braille line, this solves the problem of disturbing the surroundings. People with a visual handicap naturally enjoy movies and series. A certain barrier may occur when watching, but it is certainly not insurmountable. I honestly think it's a shame that in the case of audio commentary, it can't be set to play only in the earpiece and no one else would hear it, on the other hand, blind people might be happy at least that it's available to them. If you happen to want to experience what it's like to watch individual titles blindly, just find your favorite and just listen with your eyes closed.