Founded in 1988 by Jim Stovall, the Narrative Television Network unobtrusively adds the voice of a narrator to the existing program between the dialogue so that blind or low vision people can hear what they can't see.
When Narrative Television Network creator and president Jim Stovall lost his eyesight at age 28, he initially felt that he never wanted to leave the controlled environment of his home.
Jim and Kathy began to research together and discovered that 13 million people in the United States have visual impairment severe enough to limit their enjoyment of TV shows and movies.
This research inspired the two to develop a plan to make programming more accessible for blind and visually impaired people, and started by borrowing equipment to record some narrative soundtracks to begin their work with the goal of adding these soundtracks to existing movie audio.
[2] NTN now has 1,200 broadcast and cable affiliates, and is shown in eleven countries outside of the United States.