On Wednesday, August 13, while Kapil Sharma and his team shot an episode of The Great Indian Kapil Show with Akshay Kumar at Film City, Goregaon, loud laughter echoed from Netflix’s Bandra office — courtesy of 25 visually impaired audience members enjoying a special screening of another episode of the comedy series.

In collaboration with the National Association for the Blind (NAB), the streamer hosted the event to highlight its audio description feature that allows visually impaired viewers to understand visual cues like facial expressions, gestures, and silent movements in films and shows. “A lot of things without audio description get ignored for us because we don’t understand their expressions or small moves like when they dance or walk. When the voice-over described those, it filled gaps in our imagination,” Nishi, an audience member, told mid-day.

Rituraj, an HR professional and tech geek, added, “Without audio description, we can only experience 60 per cent of a visual story. It showed that Kapil Sharma is doing action with his finger up, and [Navjot] Sidhu is pointing at Kapil with a pillow. So, there is a visual there. With the audio description, we make up visual cues in our mind. The structure in the mind is ready, and we can imagine the action. For example, Kapil is lying down — without the audio description, we don’t know what is happening. But with it, we can feel it 100 per cent.”