Creating and evaluating personalised and accessible listening experiences based on a listener’s needs, personal preferences, and listening environment, in collaboration with partners across industry and academia.
Project from 2022 - present
What we are doing
We want our audiences to experience our media in the best way possible for them. To do this, we research ways of making the shows they watch and listen to more accessible and personalisable.
Across both accessibility and personalisation, we’re working closely with content producers both within the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ and in the wider industry to work out where changes can and should be made to production pipelines. We’re combining cutting-edge research from academic and industry partners with our own expertise to make the best possible case for new services to be included in Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ products. We do this through prototyping new systems and robust audience and producer evaluation processes. We’re also working with charities (such as the RNID) and advocates for audiences with specific accessibility requirements to find out what problems they encounter in their everyday interactions with Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ content.
The Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ aims to inform, educate, and entertain a wide range of audiences. We believe the best audio experience requires some level of personalisation to be available. Some audiences may need personalisation to make audio more accessible (e.g. hard-of-hearing and neurodiverse groups). Others may simply wish to have the option of listening in a different way by changing the emphasis of different parts of the audio mix. In the Audio team, we aim to develop methods to give audiences the right level of audio personalisation for them, and crucially, without compromising the creative autonomy of producers and the quality that people expect from the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ.
Why it matters
Audiences are at the heart of everything we do, which means providing those audiences with the best possible experiences using what’s available to us. In theory, modern technology allows us to provide options for audio accessibility and personalisation. But the gap between what’s theoretically possible and what’s deliverable to audiences can be wide.
Some solutions may not work as well as expected or require more research to work successfully on a large scale. Other issues may not have an off-the-shelf solution for the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ and need our team to develop bespoke systems. Our workstream’s research provides much-needed solutions and evidence-based recommendations on accessibility and personalisation services to the wider Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ.