WCAG defines audio description as narration added to the soundtrack to describe important visual details that cannot be understood from the main soundtrack alone. It provides information about actions, people, scene changes, on-screen text, and other visual content. Narration can be added in existing breaks in audio (standard) or the video can be paused to create space for narration to be added (extended).
It is important to note that if all of the visual information is already provided in the existing audio, there is no need to add an audio description layer. Some lecture videos may fit this criterion.
A centralized process for simple audio description is in the works but is not finalized yet. Please check back here for updates.
Until then, we highly recommend prioritizing captioning of your video content first. Then, if you have completed this, you can manually add audio description using Panopto and its help documentation on How to Add Audio Description.
Consider watching this sample of audio description from “The Lion King” to better understand how audio description is written and incorporated into content: