Sound Design

The craft of creating, selecting, and arranging audio elements - dialogue, music, ambient sound, foley, and effects - to shape the experience of a film, game, broadcast, or interactive product. For accessibility, sound design is doubly important: it carries narrative and emotional information that blind and low-vision audiences depend on when visual content is out of reach, and it is the layer where accessibility cues (audio description, earcons, spatialized dialogue, diegetic sound effects standing in for visual actions) have to be integrated without clashing with the original soundtrack or masking safety-relevant environmental audio. Accessible sound design considers spatial separation between voices, clarity of foreground vs background, dynamic range, and the recognizability of cues as distinct accessibility affordances.