Although audio description (AD) has been around since the early eighties, the number of European countries providing guidelines with regard to this new service is still very limited. Moreover, since the turn of the century, various international organizations have been advocating the creation of an international guideline on audio description. This paper compares some of the existing guidelines with a view to provide a first possible outline of such an international guideline. It solely focuses on the description of recorded audiovisual material, and given the diversity of this type of material, the article suggests a subdivision of the guideline into one general section containing standards that are valid for all categories and various sections dealing with genre-specific issues. The present article deals with only the general section, and in addition to suggesting a possible structure of this section, it also points to a few new avenues for further research.