Readers are blind

Okay, new comment. I misread the OP as for the hearing impaired, rather than the vision impaired. I have watched tv with description for the blind on PBS. It's like a radio drama. You can hear all the dialogue and action sounds such as footsteps and doors, etc. In addition, there are voiceover tags explaining silent action, such as "Bob backs away from Jill," or "Margaret cries," or "The police officer waves the bottle under the child's nose," followed by the child's hysterical scream and shouts of "THEM! THEM!" The description is kept very minimal and short because it has to fit within the pace of the program. The drama is still carried by the actors.

The ones I've heard are very matter-of-fact, so I'm not sure what you'd learn from them. I imagine you can already describe an action in bare-bones terms.

What it might highlight is what's important to describe and what isn't. There are lots of things you don't need to know to understand the scene.

One lesson I thought we could learn from it is to let the characters tell the story by what they say and do. I happen to love describing things, but yeah, I guess a little goes a long way.

I visited Youtube for some samples of this service in action.

I notice that, when the actors are not talking a lot, the describers have more time to embroider details. When dialogue is active, the descriptions are much more bare-bones:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHNHGCgkUMQ

Action scenes may be a problem as it seems difficult for the describers to keep up with the pace and not talk over the actors:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHkL0A4xi-I

But then, sometimes, it's just absolutely perfect:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M10Dxoe005E
(That's a long one at about 4 minutes, but wth, it's after 1AM, and I'm on Youtube, and clips like this make life worth living.)

And then, sometimes, sadly, it just falls a little short of the desired effect:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MTuZoNvahI

Also, how it's done:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr9JYWY7in8

ishtar'sgate said:

We see our story in our mind's eye but the reader cannot see it. If we 'see' a menacing scene, we have to write it in such a way that the reader sees it too. If we 'see' a tender moment we have to do the same.

Click to expand...

I picture my novel as a movie in my head before I write it down. The hope is that a reader will see a movie in his/er own head that resembles the one in mine. That's the whole purpose of the technical side of writing.

I don't think readers are blind, I just think too many writers treat readers as if they're blind. They write in braille, rather than actually painting a picture.

muravyets said:

But then, sometimes, it's just absolutely perfect:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M10Dxoe005E
(That's a long one at about 4 minutes, but wth, it's after 1AM, and I'm on Youtube, and clips like this make life worth living.)

Click to expand...

That was totally worth the four minutes!

Thanks for linking to the videos. It was interesting to hear some examples. For some reason, it'd never occurred to me to look for descriptive videos on YouTube.

Anyway, to address the OP's point: I agree with what has been said about descriptive videos not being directly comparable to telling a story in a written medium, since the description is usually brief. Descriptive videos are a little more comparable to the radio dramas that used to be popular pre-television, I think. Though, radio shows had the benefit of including the narration/description in the structure, whereas descriptive videos have to work within an existing structure.

So, I'm not sure if watching descriptive videos would be directly helpful in writing.

However, I think there's still a lot of truth in the comparison. I think you're right that this is something that writers deal with in general. In particular, this is an issue writers face when they aren't able to literally show something to the audience (like you can show things to non-visually impaired audiences in movies). Though not all writers "see" their stories or characters in their heads, I think it's true that many of us will have an image of something in our minds that we want to convey to readers. So while I'm not sure if watching descriptive video would help with writing techniques, it might still help to think about how visual information gets translated.

muravyets said:

But then, sometimes, it's just absolutely perfect:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M10Dxoe005E
(That's a long one at about 4 minutes, but wth, it's after 1AM, and I'm on Youtube, and clips like this make life worth living.)

Click to expand...

THAT WAS AMAZING. Thank you for the links... especially this one! Totally made my day.