Audio description renders visual performances and artworks accessible by speaking information that some audience members cannot see. Traditional guidelines instruct describers to be neutral: name visible actions, colors, and spatial relations while withholding interpretation. The aspiration guards against replacing a work with the describer's judgment. But a description cannot mention everything. Choosing to report a character's clenched hand rather than the pattern on her coat already treats one detail as more consequential.

Acknowledging selection does not license free commentary. A describer who declares that a character is jealous forecloses possibilities that “she turns away as he embraces another person” leaves open. The useful distinction is not between interpretation and its total absence, but between descriptions that expose their observable basis and assertions that conceal or exceed it.

Because relevance depends on the work's unfolding form, effective description also requires timing. Speech inserted over a musical pause may communicate a gesture while destroying the pause's dramatic force. Collaboration with directors, performers, and blind consultants can reveal which visual information is indispensable and where words can enter without displacing another element.

No single track will serve every listener equally: prior knowledge, hearing, and preferences differ. Multiple tracks or adjustable levels of detail may therefore be more faithful to access than a supposedly universal script. Neutrality remains valuable as a warning against unsupported verdicts. It should not be mistaken for a condition in which selection, emphasis, and craft disappear.

Genre further complicates what counts as an observable basis. In a farce, naming a concealed prop before the sighted audience can see it may destroy a joke; in dance, describing every limb position may obscure a larger pattern of acceleration and release. Literal completeness can therefore be less faithful than selective description. The relevant question is not simply which facts are visible, but which visual relations organize the experience at that moment.

Blind consultants do more than verify that a script is understandable. They may identify where a describer's assumptions about relevance reflect sighted habits—for example, an emphasis on costume color when spatial orientation is needed to follow the action. Yet consultation should not be treated as outsourcing a single authentic blind perspective. Consultants disagree, as audiences do. Their contribution is to widen the evidence about how descriptive choices function.

This makes revision after performance important. A script that reads well on paper may crowd dialogue or arrive too late to orient a listener. Testing, timing, and revision turn selection from an invisible intuition into a craft open to criticism. Accountability, here as in the wording of particular phrases, depends on exposing the basis of choice without pretending choice can be abolished.