NIAAA VR Experience Wins Audio Description Award

The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) was honored in July for its Your Brain Virtual Reality (VR) experience. NIAAA received the 2024 Achievement in Audio Description public sector award from the American Council of the Blind’s Audio Description Project.

The winning video shows a rollercoaster traveling through different areas of the brain—the body’s command center—and how alcohol affects these areas. The ride travels from the decision-making region, the prefrontal cortex, through the nucleus accumbens, to the emotion-regulating and threat-assessing amygdala, to the memory-making hippocampus and finally to the movement and balance-controlling area of the brain, the cerebellum.

This award celebrates outstanding contributions to the quality, availability and understanding of audio description. The video version of NIAAA’s Virtual Brain that provides audio descriptions for users with low or no vision and captions for viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing is available at bit.ly/3zHv4PE.