Sky Sports is trying to make its live coverage of Premier League football more accessible to people who are partially sighted, blind or hard-of-hearing with some new updates.
The company says it’s introducing two new features that “mark a significant step forward” in terms of making live sports more accessible.
For instance, subscribers to its various live sports channels will be able to enjoy a Live Descriptive Audio Commentary feature, which is powered by artificial intelligence. Sky explained that it’s designed to enable people with sight loss and limited vision follow live football games more closely. It’s essentially a continuous, blow-by-blow commentary of what’s actually happening in the game, closer to traditional radio commentary, rather than the usual chitchat provided by its regular match commentators.
The idea is to help supporters better visualise the game action, with the service providing continuous updates regarding which player is in possession, which players are making runs, who’s passing to who and where they’re passing too. Sky believes it will enable a “richer and more immersive live football experience.”
The feature won’t be enabled for every single one of Sky’s live Premier League matches, unfortunately. Sky said it will be available for 109 games per season, which is around one game per day in each gameweek. Users will be able to see if it’s available by opening up the TV Guide and scrolling to the match programme. If a small AD icon appears followed by a short beep, that means the feature is enabled for that specific game, Sky said.
As for the second accessibility update, this is targeted at hard-of-hearing and deaf football fans. It’s called Live Subtitles, and it uses AI to generate captions of the live commentary, analysis and on-screen dialogue in real-time. It will be available for every Premier League game broadcast by Sky, which amounts to 210 games a season.
Sky said it’s making the new features available across Sky+, Sky Glass, Sky Stream and Sky Q, so nobody is going to miss out. They’ll also be available on its NOW streaming platform and through Virgin Media.
