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that’s happening on the field with all the same types of things that a fan might see on a broadcast, and more, so they’re not missing out completely on all that extra information they could have received in the broadcast.” Bronson also points to the fan zones as an example of how fan experience played a key role in the tournament. “Coming out here and basically having the same experience and being able to watch the game live, react to it live and see every aspect of it was really the goal,” he says. “Van Wagner’s production team wanted to make it feel like everyone was included and had access to the same experience.” EXPANDING THE AUDIENCE While the Fan Festival deployed live captioning on LED screens to help deaf and hard-of-hearing supporters follow commentary, FIFA added services aimed at visually impaired audiences.
The FIFA World Cup 2026 made its mark as one of the most inclusive instalments of the tournament to date – being the first time the World Cup featured live sign language interpretation for all the games. Audio descriptive commentary and haptic boards were also available and FIFA released the official FIFA audio description app. The app provides real-time narration that details the on-pitch action, body language, crowd atmosphere and ball movement for all 104 matches. Joe Lewis, head of audio at The Voiceover Gallery, is embracing this change. “The World Cup has made such an effort in terms of audio description in that they tried to audio describe 100% of the games, albeit only in English, Spanish and French, but it does highlight the fact that it isn’t done elsewhere. Arabic wasn’t included though, so there are definitely improvements to be made.”
The Royal National Institute of Blind People estimates that there are over two million people living with sight loss in the UK. This includes those whose eyesight is severe enough to have a significant impact on their daily lives. Additionally, around 320,000 people are registered as sight impaired or severely sight impaired. “That is a significant enough portion of the population that audio description should probably be mandatory,” argues Lewis. “I genuinely believe that a lot of people don’t even know that audio description exists.” According to Lewis, audio description is a great use case for AI automation because of the volume of content, but it isn’t there yet. “We have seen some solutions, but I’m deeply cynical about people’s expectations of what AI can achieve versus what’s actually possible. So, I think it’s really a technical problem at the moment, and that’s not good
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