About
Enabling the Extended Audio Description (EAD) plugin provides spoken descriptions of the visuals and actions happening on screen. Using words to describe locations, people, actions, and body language makes your content more accessible.
When playback reaches an EAD cue, the player pauses and presents the description. Depending on the player configuration, the description is played as audio narration, displayed as on-screen text, or both.
The EAD plugin is not supported on live entries.
Setup
To learn how to configure your player with EAD, see Enable Extended audio description in the player.
Features
When playback reaches an Extended Audio Description cue, the player pauses and presents the description. Depending on the player configuration, the description is played as audio narration, displayed as on-screen text, or both.
After the audio narration finishes, the description overlay remains available for up to 5 seconds, giving you time to replay or skip the description before playback resumes.
If Keep video paused is enabled, playback remains paused until you resume playback or skip the description.
While the description is active, an overlay is displayed on the player with the following:
- A moving indicator (vertical lines animation) shows that the description is active.
- The description, if enabled, is displayed on the screen. If the description is longer than the available space, you can scroll to read it.
- Click Pause (or press K on your keyboard) to pause the audio narration.
- Click Skip (or Shift + S on your keyboard) to skip the description and resume playback.
- Click Replay (or Shift + R on your keyboard) to replay the description.
- Click Slow down to decrease the audio narration speed.
- Click Speed up to increase the audio narration speed.
- Click the X button to close the description overlay. The Pause, Slow down, Speed up, Skip, and Replay controls remain available.
Your display will differ depending on whether Full screen overlay is enabled. When enabled, the description overlay is displayed in full-screen mode.
EAD overlay with narration speed controlsClick the gear icon at the top right corner to access the following options:
- Descriptive text – Show or hide the description text.
- Audio narration – Turn audio narration on or off.
- Keep video paused – Keep the video paused after the audio narration finishes until you resume playback or skip the description.
- You can upload EAD files in WebVTT format through the Rich Media Content Management System. See Upload and manage captions in Rich Media CMS.
- When uploading EAD files, only time-based cues are supported. HTML tags and other markup (such as
<b>,<i>, or<div>) aren't supported and may cause playback issues.
Try it out
You can edit the EAD with the Captions editor, but only if the track is received from the REACH vendor as a captions asset, not as an attachment (legacy).
