Emirates Innovates with Inflight Entertainment for Visually Impaired
Emirates continues to set industry standards by becoming the first airline to introduce Audio Description on movies for
visually impaired customers on its inflight entertainment system, ice Digital Widescreen.
Audio Description, increasingly common in cinemas and TV, is a recorded narration explaining the scene during the gaps
in dialogue, while the film soundtrack continues at its normal pace.
Emirates’ ice (information, communication and entertainment) system was recently awarded the ‘World's Best Airline
Inflight Entertainment’ award at the Skytrax World Airline Awards for the 10th consecutive year. ice now offers Audio
Description soundtracks on 16 Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures films including Frozen, Saving Mr. Banks, Cars 2,
Monsters University , Marvel’s The Avengers, Toy Story 3 and all four Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
In 2007, Emirates also worked with Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures to introduce Closed Captions, the technology used
by the hard of hearing, for the first time in inflight entertainment. As well as showing the actors' dialogues in
subtitles, Closed Captions also include references to sound effects used in the movie. This August ice Digital
Widescreen offering will include more than 50 movies with Closed Captions.
“Our focus is not just the depth and diversity of our on-board entertainment, but also relevance,” said Patrick
Brannelly, Emirates’ Vice President Corporate Communications Product, Publishing, Digital & Events. “Making entertainment accessible to our diverse customers is very important to us. It was our motivation to
introduce movies that can be enjoyed by customers with visual difficulties.
“Our greatest satisfaction comes from delivering an exceptional customer experience, which we hope our constant
innovation fulfils. In future, we want to add more content with Audio Description, so visually impaired passengers can
be entertained with an even wider choice of content when flying with us.”
Emirates flies A380 aircraft three times daily from Auckland to Dubai and beyond via Australia, with a daily Boeing
777-300ER service from Christchurch.
Emirates’ award-winning ice Digital Widescreen offers a staggering choice of more than 1,800 channels of entertainment,
including over 400 movies from around the world, hundreds of hours of Tv and thousands of hours of music from
contemporary to classical. Customers onboard Emirates’ new Airbus A380 and Boeing 777 aircraft will now be able to enjoy
the ice system on larger personal Tv screens with HD resolution - 27-inch in First Class, 20-inch in Business Class and
12.1 inch in Economy Class.
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