GUANGZHOU (Xinhua) — With the help of audio description given by volunteers, visually impaired people in south China’s Guangzhou “watched” live broadcasting of China’s National Day celebrations on Tuesday.
“The aircrafts are flying through the sky in a shape of triangle, with seven lines of colored clouds behind,” the volunteers described the formation in detail.
On Tuesday, a grand military parade and a 100,000-people mass pageantry were held in Beijing to celebrate the 70th founding anniversary of the People’s Republic of China.
A total of 100 visually-impaired people “watched” the broadcast in Guangzhou Library. Wearing earphones, they got a full account of the celebrations from two volunteers.
For Lu Haixia, one of the volunteers, narrating a live broadcasting put her under great pressure.
“It takes me 100 hours to prepare the oral scripts for a movie, and much more hours for preparing for such a long live broadcasting in order to provide informative accounts of the event to the audience,” she said.
“With the detailed narration, I feel like seeing formations parading on the Chang’an Avenue, and that I can get more involved in the cheering,” said Wang Zeyu, one of the “viewers.”
This was the first time for Guangzhou to introduce a live broadcast of major celebrations with audio description to the visually impaired. Organizers of the event hope to carry the effort forward to give the visually impaired more confidence to get integrated into the society.
