As easy to follow as tennis is visually, on an audioscape level, it’s as tough to follow as an episode of Twin Peaks you’ve switched on halfway through. That’s a challenge engineers from Tennis Australia, digital design and communications agency AKQA, and Monash University in Melbourne, Australia are working to solve with something called Action Audio. It’s an online audio stream that was developed for last month’s Australian Open broadcasts to assist the 285 million people globally — many of whom are tennis fans — living with blindness or a visual impairment.
“[We wanted people to be able to] make their own appraisal of what’s happening on the court,” Devine said. “So they can have their own insights, rather than just having the insights created by a commentator. They have more information. They’re able to say, ‘wow, Federer’s really hammering the backhand tonight.’