Netflix joins, as Apple did a few days ago, to Celebrating World Accessibility Awareness Day, with the announcement of several novelties aimed at improving the accessibility of its contents. And something to note is that, on this occasion, the effort is focused especially on the international community, instead of doing so exclusively on the English-speaking community, as is unfortunately common in many services and platforms.
And it is that, as we can read in the company’s official blog, Netflix will focus a good part of its efforts on the extension of titles with descriptive audio (AD) and descriptive subtitles (SPS) in up to 30 languages, with Spanish among them. It is, yes, a medium-term plan, since its intentions are to start working on it and conclude the main part of the project, that is, the one related to the contents that are already present on the platform, in 2023.
The term is understood, yes, knowing how ambitious the project is, and it is that Netflix has proposed to add this type of aid to improve the accessibility of its content to the entire Netflix original catalog, that is, all the own productions of the streaming service. This, a few years ago, would have meant only a small part of the platform’s total content offer, but since it has seen its catalog empty of third-party content, it has had to step on the accelerator in this regard.
Consequently, currently a large part of the Netflix catalog is made up of its own production, and this is something that will only increase in the future. Thus, logically, we must understand that Netflix’s plans in this regard are not limited only to the existing “Original by Netflix”, but also to all present and future productions in which the company embarks, with the difference of that in those cases the availability of descriptive audio and descriptive subtitles could occur from the moment the content debuts on the platform.
Additionally, Netflix will also modify the elements of the platform’s signage for this type of aid, in order to facilitate its rapid identification. This, personally, seems to me to be a great success, since certain icons on small screens can become difficult to see. If the new elements make it easier for people with some kind of visual impairment to identify them, this will undoubtedly mean a huge improvement in the Netflix user experience for these people.
