Last updated by kprzemek on 2019-11-15. Originally submitted by tomski on 2019-11-13.
WA Friday Lunch Talks are monthly meetings with presentations of current research results or research in progress by WA faculty, staff, or PhD students. Each talk is of 45 minutes (+15 minutes for discussion). We welcome all to a talk "Audio description, Universal Design and the future of audio describer training" by dr Iwona Mazur (Friday, Nov 15, 13:15-14:15, Sala Górna, Coll. Heliodori).
dr Iwona Mazur
Department of Translation Studies
Audio description, Universal Design and the future of audio describer training
Audio description (AD) is a type of intersemiotic translation whereby images are translated into words (cf. Jakobson 1966). Although its primary aim is to make visual content (such as films, theater plays, opera performances, museum exhibitions or sports events) accessible to blind and visually impaired people, a number of recent studies have shown that it can also benefit sighted persons (see e.g. Mazur 2019). Traditionally, AD has been created for finished products, for example, in the case of films at the post-production or even distribution stage. However, following developments in Universal Design (UD), there is now a call for AD to be accounted for already at the stage of production of (audio) visual content (e.g. Fryer 2018; Romero-Fresco 2019). This, coupled with the recently adopted legislation in the form of the European Accessibility Act (2019), is likely to significantly increase the demand for professional audio describers in the near future.
In order to address this demand, a group of AD researchers and professionals from six European countries came together under the umbrella of ADLAB PRO: A Laboratory for the Development of a New Professional Profile, a three-year (2016-2019) European project financed under the Erasmus+ Programme. The project’s main aim was to create flexible, fully customizable audio description training materials that would be available online to train prospective audio describers.
In the presentation I will first briefly go over the AD process and the concept of Universal Design including in relation to AD, and then discuss the ADLAB PRO project with its main Intellectual Outputs (IOs), with a special focus on the AD training landscape and training materials. The presentation’s secondary aim will be to shift the audience’s perception of disability and promote the idea of an inclusive society.
References:
Fryer, Louise. (2018). The independent audio describer is dead: Long live audio description! Journal of Audiovisual Translation, 1(1), 170-186.
Jakobson, Roman. (1966). On linguistic aspects of translation. In R.A. Brower (Ed.), On Translation (pp. 233-239). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Mazur, Iwona. (2019). Audio description for all? Enhancing the experience of sighted viewers through visual media access services. In D. Abend-David (Ed.), Representing Translation: Representation of Translation and Translators in Contemporary Media (pp. 122-150). New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Romero-Fresco, Pablo. (2019). Accessible filmmaking: Integrating translation and accessibility into the filmmaking process. London: Routledge.
