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The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the world’s largest performing arts festival, welcoming thousands of artists and audiences to Edinburgh each year.

To support artists in delivering accessible performances, the festival required a reliable audio description solution that could work across multiple performance environments and help audiences with sensory impairments fully experience the shows.

The Challenge

With hundreds of performances taking place in diverse venues—from theatres and studios to temporary performance spaces—providing consistent accessibility support can be challenging.

Artists needed a simple and dependable way to deliver audio description during live performances, ensuring that blind and visually impaired audience members could follow visual elements such as stage movement, physical comedy, and scene changes. The solution also had to be portable, easy for artists and technicians to operate, and adaptable to different venue setups throughout the festival.

"The equipment is high quality, reliable, and well suited to the varied performance environments across the festival."
Access Projects Officer, Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society
The Solution

ListenTALK wireless communication system designed to support audio described performances across the festival.

The setup included ListenTALK receivers and earpieces for audience members, allowing those who require audio description to listen clearly without disrupting the performance. A mini mixer and microphones were used to transmit the live audio description from the describer directly to the receivers.

This flexible and customised system allowed performers and access teams to integrate audio description into their shows with minimal technical complexity, while maintaining clear and reliable transmission in a wide range of performance environments.

The Benefits

The system has become a trusted accessibility resource used by artists across the festival. By providing reliable audio description technology, the programme is able to support more accessible performances and help ensure that audiences with visual impairments can fully engage with the festival experience. 

"The audio description kit we’ve hired from Apple Sound over the last few years continues to be a valuable resource for our Edinburgh Fringe artists and audiences. The equipment is high quality, reliable, and well suited to the varied performance environments across the festival. By giving artists access to this kit, we’re able to support them in offering audio‑described performances, which in turn helps make more performances accessible to blind and visually impaired audiences."
Access Projects Officer, Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society
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