Introduction
The American Council of the Blind’s Audio Description project maintains a presence in social media and moderates a group list where many consumers of audio description, or AD, discuss developments in the AD space. Besides comments on AD narrators, script writers, and quality, people often discuss the positives and challenges of accessing audio description content on streaming services.
In response to the high volume of AD consumer feedback, the Audio Description Project decided to create a survey that could get more formal data to share with the AD community and providers.
The ADP completed the survey design in the spring of 2026. We then partnered with Professor Nicole Rivers of Suffolk University. She has worked with the ADP in the past and is well known for her experience with developing, compiling, and analysing survey data. Professor Rivers and her team launched the survey in July and closed it at the end of August 2026. The following report provides a summary of data from that survey.
About the Survey
Survey of blind and low-vision streaming viewers:
- 337 respondents — 74.5% blind, 16.4% low vision, 9.1% neither
- Nine accessibility aspects were rated per service across the eight major streaming services, plus open-ended comments.
- Fieldwork closed 3 September 2026.
- Prepared by the Moakley Center for Public Management, Suffolk University, for the Audio Description Project
Survey Questions
Survey questions focused on the following areas:
- Ease of setting up the service and creating an account
- Ease of logging in and accessing your personal profile
- Ease of finding and setting up personalization options (e.g., profile picture)
- Ease of finding and activating the audio description setting
- Compatibility of the service with your primary screen reader
- Ability to set independent volume levels for screen reader
- Clarity and usability of the home page or landing page layout for navigation
- Ease of finding specific content (e.g., using search, browsing genres, navigating categories)
- Ease of finding and accessing playback controls while watching content (e.g., play, pause)
All eight services ranked with the nine rated aspects using a scale 1-5, where 1 is Very Difficult and 5 is Very Easy.
Who Responded
- Age (n=331): Data tends to skew older.
- 24.5% are 40-49, 19.0% are 50-59, 14.5% are 70 or older, 13.9% are 60-69; 15.7% are 30-39 and 11.8% are 19-29.
Residence (n=318):
- 89.6% in the United States
- Largest non-US groups are Canada (10), Australia (6), New Zealand (4) and Thailand (2).
Visual access features (n=192):
- Dark mode 52.1%
- Screen magnification 20.8%
- High contrast mode 18.8%
Screen readers (n=333):
- VoiceOver 44.7%
- JAWS 15.0%
- NVDA 8.1%
- Amazon VoiceView 3.9%
- Roku screen reader 5.7%
Devices used (n=322 multi-select):
- Smartphone 71.4%
- Smart TV 49.7%
- Computer 37.6%
- Streaming device such as Fire TV or Roku 37.3%
- Cable or live-TV provider 31.1%
- Tablet 27.0%
Headline Findings
Streaming accessibility is broadly workable but unreliable at the one point that matters most to this audience: turning audio description on and keeping it on. Every service scored between 3.17 and 3.84 out of 5 — no platform is failing outright, and none is excelling. What separates them is audio description handling, not general navigation.
Where the Services Landed
The streaming services listed on the survey were (alphabetized, not by rank): Apple TV, Amazone Prime, Disney +, HBO Max, Hulu, Netflix, Paramount Plus and Peacock. The overall rankings for the services ranged from 3.84 to 3.17. The spread between best and worst is only 0.67 of a point, which means the service a viewer chooses matters less than the specific task they are trying to complete or the content they are looking to view.
The Common Pattern Across All Eight Streaming Providers
Logging in and accessing a profile is the strongest aspect on almost every service. Independent volume control for the description track is the weakest on six of the eight. Audio description activation reliability shows the widest gap of anything measured — 1.20 points and is the issue named most often in open-ended comments on every service.
Comment sentiment follows the same shape on every platform: best-feature responses run 88-99% positive while frustration responses run 81-98% negative, and the frustrations name the same four items across all platforms.
The Four Recurring Failure Modes
- Viewers cannot tell which titles carry audio description without opening each one — the most common complaint in the survey.
- Audio description does not stay switched on between episodes and sessions.
- Playback and settings buttons are unlabelled or announced inconsistently by screen readers.
- Playback controls hide themselves mid-programme and become hard to recover.
What the Findings Point To
- Surface audio description availability at the browse level, before playback.
- Persist the AD setting across episodes, sessions, and devices.
- Give the description track its own volume control, independent of programme audio.
- Label every playback and settings control so screen readers announce it correctly.
- Keep playback controls reachable throughout playback rather than auto-hiding them.
Sample sizes vary by service and are not adjusted: Amazon Prime n=180, Netflix n=119, Apple TV+ n=82, Disney+ n=75, HBO Max n=57, Hulu n=57, Paramount Plus n=48, Peacock n=46. Each overall rating is the unweighted mean of that service's nine aspect averages.