James O’Hara, a graduate of Manchester and Aberdeen Universities, was a professional broadcaster with ITV and the BBC, before going freelance in 1990. He became involved with audio description in 1994 working on the Audetel Project.

He joined ITFC in 1995 and is now the Managing Editor of their Audio Description Department. Since 2000 audio description has been compulsory in the United Kingdom for Digital Terrestrial Broadcasters and now is legally required on Digital Satellite and Cable.

ITFC has been at the forefront of audio description preparation for many of the broadcasters and has become increasingly involved with AD for the cinema. James has narrated the AD for the Lord of the Rings trilogy of films and more recently the latest Bond movie Quantum of Solace amongst a host of others.

James O’Hara led a workshop at the In So Many Words conference in London in February 2004 and chaired a round table on audio description. He gave a presentation on AD at the Languages and the Media Conference in Berlin in November of 2004 and led more workshops in Barcelona in 2005, in Copenhagen in 2007 and again in London in 2008. He gave a presentation in Athens in 2008 to the Workshop of the Hellenic Audiovisual Institute (IOM) on The Business Model of Audio Description.  He teaches a module on audio description at Roehampton University .