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Star Wars Outlaws
Innovating Audio Accessibility in Star Wars Outlaws - Interview with Jennissary of Descriptive Audio Works
Ahead of The Game Awards, we sat down with Jenna to talk about the work done on improving Star Wars Outlaws' accessibility and accessibility in gaming as a whole.
Audio transcription
"You're late, Kay. Danka's waiting.
What? Are you worried?
No.
Okay."
"Kay and ND-5 approach a guard. Subtitles.
Not the droid.
What?
They both halt.
Hi, Gamereactor friends. As you know, I'm still playing Star Wars Outlaws to this date."
"I think we can all agree it's a much better game now after the several updates.
I've played the recent DLC.
I've interviewed its directors and Humberly González as well, main actor.
And speaking about actors, there's something very interesting we're talking about today with Jenna here."
"Thank you so much for joining us, which is, you know, you guys got a nomination.
This is being recorded right before TGA.
So congratulations on that nomination on innovation for accessibility.
So this is all about audio description for cutscenes."
"So what can you tell me about the work you guys do? Thank you so much.
Yeah, of course. Thank you so much for having me.
So for those who don't know, audio description is an accessibility feature that is available on, that has been available in movies and TV shows for a couple of decades now, but only recently started coming to games."
"It is a scripted narrator who talks in between existing dialogue to describe the visuals on screen.
It's primarily intended for people who are blind or visually impaired, but it can also be useful for a lot of other people as well.
So in Star Wars Outlaws, what that means is if you turn on this feature in the accessibility settings, you'll hear our lovely narrators describing the on-screen visuals during certain cinematics."
"Is this the first game you've worked on at Descriptive Video Works?
No, so there are a handful of games that have come out with professional audio description, and so far Descriptive Video Works has done all of them.
A few other games have produced audio description in-house, but the first one that we did was The Last of Us Part I that came out in 2022."
"So it hasn't really been long.
So tell me a little bit more about the process that goes into these audio descriptions.
How do you choose the actors? At which point do you enter the development of the game?
How do you collaborate with the scriptwriters for the game and with the other actors, perhaps?
I don't know, with cutscene directors? How does it work behind the scenes?
Yeah, for sure. So in movies and TV shows, we would usually be what's part of a post-production step."
"So that means once all of the audio and video is completely finalized and locked down, that's when we come in and write our audio description.
But with games it's different, because the game is never really done until it's done.
And sometimes not even then."
"If I've learned anything, it's wild how last minute everything kind of comes together.
But what that means for us in the typical workflow of game development is there's sort of a sweet spot a few months before release where visuals and audio are complete enough for us to do our job, and the incomplete bits aren't necessarily going to deviate too much at that point."
"Because our job is to describe what the end result is going to look like as faithfully and accurately as possible.
But we might not have all of the knowledge that we need to fill that in at that time.
So it's a much more collaborative effort between us and the game developer, because we might ask them questions that they wouldn't expect, in the sense that we might ask, like, what are the side characters' pronouns?
What is this object called? What is this location called?
And they help us out by giving us access to resources like concept art or scripts or character art to help show us what the end product is going to be, so that we can put that into our script."
"And then once we've finished writing things, we'll send it back to them to review it, to make sure everything works, it's all accurate.
And then we record it with our narrators before sending that audio back to them.
So there's a lot of back and forth."
"Yeah, and this that you just described, you can apply this to pretty much any big video game.
But you mentioned Last of Us before, and it's pretty different in both terms.
The story is different. It's not an open world game like this one, where things can happen in a different order."
"And also, it's, of course, a different developer.
So what can you tell me has been the main differences between your work before and this game with Ubisoft?
Yeah, so it can be wildly different."
"Because, well, first of all, with Last of Us Part I, with the full remaster of the game, the story had already come out many years previously.
So we kind of already knew what the audio and video was ultimately going to look like just without the graphical updates."
"So we had access to, air quotes, finished versions of the cinematics going into it.
And we didn't really anticipate major changes in that.
So that was probably the biggest difference between the two.
But also, this is the first, as far as I know, the first Star Wars video game to receive audio description."
"And as I'm sure you know, the Star Wars universe is massive and extensive.
I was one of only two writers on this project, the other being Michael Bradford, who is sort of our go-to Star Wars expert.
He has worked on a lot of other Star Wars projects before, and he knows the significance of not mistaking a landspeeder for something else."
"I think that was probably the biggest challenge, was making sure that we kept all of the alien races accurate, all of the vehicles, weapons, anything that came on screen that was Star Wars-specific.
We not only had to make sure that we identified it accurately, but that we chose whether to use in-universe terminology to describe it."
"Because we also have to consider, is the average person, not just a massive Star Wars fan, going to know what this is?
Is it available just in English, or there are more languages?
Just English."
"Just English for now, all right.
What can you tell me about the scale of the project?
Of course, we're talking about AAA games.
But do you think this is going to happen more and more for smaller-scale AA games, hopefully, as an accessibility feature going forward?
Do you guys think the industry is ready for that?
I certainly hope so, yes."
"We've seen more developers give more conscious focus to blind accessibility in their games.
I want to say before, just a couple of years ago, it was nigh unheard of."
"And now we have multiple developers who are leading the charge and pushing for more and more every time.
The superstars in this are, of course, Ubisoft.
Every single one of their games in the past few years has ratcheted up the number of accessibility features in their games."
"And, of course, they got nominated for Innovation and Accessibility this year at the Game Awards.
Along with a lot of other nominations at the Game Accessibility Conference.
So now we're seeing some more mainstream focus on accessibility in those games."
"And I'm hoping that that makes it more into the cultural zeitgeist because, in my opinion, someone is much more likely to go through all of the options in a game than they are to look through the language settings on a streaming service."
"Because there's audio description there as well, but how often do you go browsing through what languages are available?
Whereas in a game, you're much more likely to stumble across something that you might not have even known could benefit you."
"And more and more studios have specific positions for accessibility and that's good news as well.
We were recently talking with IO Interactive in Lisbon and they have this specific position champion of accessibility."
"Joshua is in charge of this.
And he said the main challenge for players still is limited vision or problems with sight and disabilities that have to do with vision."
"So it's really nice that we see more and more.
And we're talking about costs.
So I have to ask you about AI.
You knew this was going to come, this was coming."
"So we've seen both good and bad uses and lots of different opinions.
Do you consider it to be like a helpful tool for you guys to work on more and perhaps better audio descriptions or a threat to your jobs and your work?
Yeah, of course we got to touch on the AI button."
"So currently our studio doesn't use any form of generative AI.
Although to some extent it's unavoidable.
I think my spell checker is technically AI powered, although I'm not really sure what that means."
"But for now we have kind of taken...
So the American Council of the Blind and the National Federation of the Blind, two American organizations where I'm located, have both taken very strong stances against the use of generative AI in audio description, mainly because it tends to reduce quality."
"Right now AI is very bad at following the rules and giving emotive narrative performances.
But that might change in the future.
We're open to change and evolving, of course."
"In some ways it would be nice for there to just be a higher quantity of audio description that's available, especially since it's still relatively rare in games.
But we don't want that to come at the cost of quality to an already underserved audience."
"The other thing that we have to think about is that the industry is already inherently hostile to people with disabilities, and it would possibly eliminate roles that are open to people with disabilities in audio description."
"Right now we do our best to employ blind QCers and narrators wherever possible.
The two narrators who worked on Star Wars Outlaws are both visually impaired themselves, and we don't want AI to directly be taking food out of their mouths."
"We don't want AI to be taking over something that could be better representation for them.
Of course.
We'd have loved to have the narrators today with us."
"Which would you say?
The game is full of very shocking, interesting twists and cutscenes and some spectacular moments.
Of course, we don't want to get into spoiler territory, but which would you say is the cutscene they had the most fun with after working on Star Wars Outlaws?
Oh, gosh."
"Unfortunately, I can't say because it's a cutscene that's right near the end of the game, but I'll give them no spoilery version.
Yeah, exactly."
"Which one is it?
A hint.
There's a character who's having a very threatening conversation with a second character, and it's done in a very visually spectacular manner, and we were very fortunate that we had space to describe those visuals, and I think that's probably my favorite."
"Slyro slowly gets to his feet, dusting off the shoulders of his fur-lined cape.
The fury returns to his eyes as he pulls out the comm link.
Ready my ship."
"Now.
He storms out of the office as an empty display case looms behind him.
Another favorite of mine, I will give a shout-out to Steve Saylor, who dubs over the masculine alien dialogue in the game, so he got to do a very excellent Jabba the Hutt impression during the scenes with Jabba, and if you haven't seen the audio description, those are the cut scenes to turn it on for because it's a lot of fun."
"A guard kicks Vail into the hole and Hoss lies.
Hoss tumbles into a cave littered with bones beside Vail, Kay, and Nix.
Alone you fell into my pit."
"Together you escaped my Rancor.
Find the spy and I will forgive your disrespect.
Vail quickly exits the throne room.
I will definitely do it, yeah, yeah, yeah."
"Does the first one happen inside a spaceship?
Uh, yes.
Okay, okay, okay, now I know.
Now I know.
Now I know."
"Now I know.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right.
All right, closing one.
All right, closing one."
"I think we all call this accessibility because it's, of course, specific settings and specific things for making the game more accessible, but at the same time, I think we could all call this inclusion as well, and Outlaws is a very good game in that regard."
"It features the first Latina lead in the whole Star Wars universe.
It features Droid, which is a co-protagonist, which is MD-5, who has a lot of nods and nice messages for autistic people."
"So how do you think you guys are part of this inclusion that we are seeing more and more in games and not just the specific helpful accessibility features?
Yeah, first non-binary character as well, I believe."
"I don't believe Star Wars has had other...
Yeah, and a bunch of supporting characters.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
For sure."
"Yeah, so for us, this means being able to...
Obviously, if you are someone who prefers or depends on audio description to be able to follow a story, this is massive."
"This is the difference between being able to enjoy the story of Star Wars Outlaws or not being able to.
It's a pretty stark binary.
But it also meant that we got to cast two visually impaired narrators for it to further that inclusivity and push a little further into representation as well."
"I should clarify, though, I am a sighted person.
It feels a little weird for me to be talking about that on behalf of others.
That's not my intent."
"But I just love that more of my friends can enjoy this game.
For sure.
Okay, I think that's enough.
I only have to say, may the Force be with you on the awards."
"Thank you.
Good luck with that and keep working on making these games more enjoyable for more people.
Thank you so much for your time."
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