The archive · Product Ideas · Product decision · 2021–2023
Action Audio sonifies live tennis for blind fans — D&AD 2022 Yellow Pencil
AKQA, Tennis Australia and Monash University translate real-time ball tracking into spatial audio, letting blind and low-vision fans follow every point live.
Tennis Australia · AKQA · Monash University
What it had to solve
Tennis is a visual game — audiences follow it by watching the ball — which locks blind and low-vision fans out of live sport. Tennis Australia already captured real-time ball position data for its broadcasts; the challenge was turning that data into something ears could read in the moment.
How it works
Tennis is followed with the eyes: the speed, spin and direction of the ball are the whole game. That makes live tennis effectively inaccessible to blind and low-vision audiences, who are left with radio commentary describing what they cannot see. With more than 285 million people worldwide living with visual impairment, AKQA Melbourne set out with Tennis Australia and Monash University to build a world-first alternative.
The insight was that Tennis Australia already had the raw material: a computer-vision ball-tracking system that captures the ball's real-time position during broadcasts. Action Audio translates that data into spatial audio, so listeners hear the ball's speed and trajectory, three blips when it nears the line, and different sounds for forehand and backhand — a 3D soundscape that lets ears follow what eyes cannot.
The service launched at the 2021 Australian Open finals, bringing live tennis to blind and low-vision audiences for the first time, and by 2022 it covered every Rod Laver Arena centre-court match. It served 6,000+ blind and low-vision Australians at launch and has since been delivered across 80+ tournaments, with the NBA Launchpad programme later piloting the system for basketball.
Action Audio became one of the most awarded pieces of accessibility work of its cycle: two Yellow Pencils at D&AD 2022, a Gold at the Clio Sports awards, a Fast Company World Changing Idea Award, and more — evidence that building inclusion into the core experience can also be a creative flagship.
Why it lands
- The solution reused data the sport already captured for broadcasts, so the innovation was a translation problem, not an infrastructure problem.
- Spatial audio made the game legible in the dimension blind fans can read — sound — instead of describing it in words.
- The system was co-developed with blind and low-vision audiences, so the cues were built from how people actually listen, not how sighted people imagine blindness.
- It scaled beyond one event: from the Australian Open finals to 80+ tournaments, then into basketball through the NBA Launchpad programme.
- Conveying speed, trajectory and line proximity made the audio stream an experience in its own right, not a charity add-on.
What it did
At launch the service served 6,000+ blind and low-vision Australians, and it has since been delivered across 80+ tennis tournaments, giving a pathway to live sport for 285M+ visually impaired people worldwide. It won two D&AD 2022 Yellow Pencils and a Clio Sports Gold, and was picked by the NBA Launchpad programme to pilot the system in basketball.
What you can take
Accessibility is not an overlay — it is a design brief. The data already captured for broadcasts became a new sensory channel, so inclusion added no cost — it created a product nobody else had built.
Since then
Action Audio expanded quickly after its 2021 Australian Open debut: by 2022 it covered every centre-court match at Rod Laver Arena, and it went on to 80+ tennis tournaments worldwide. The NBA Launchpad programme selected the system in 2023 to pilot it in basketball, extending the approach beyond tennis. Alongside two D&AD 2022 Yellow Pencils and a Clio Sports Gold, it earned a Fast Company World Changing Idea Award and became AKQA's most awarded work of the year, widely cited as a new global standard for accessibility in live sport.
Sources
- Tennis Australia — Action Audio | Case Study
- AKQA wins Gold at the Clio Sports awards
- D&AD: Australia wins 3 Yellow Pencils
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