ABSTRACT
Audio description is to describe for people with visual impairments what they can't perceive if they don't see it. AD covers almost all fields of the society, e.g. film, theatre, opera, ballet, circus, football, exhibitions, museums, architecture, gardens and conferences. In Sweden, television offers some audio described programmes, and the Swedish Film institute supports to some extent audio description of movies. A lot more needs to be done. Since 2011, some 70 Swedish audio descriptors have been trained at Fellingsbro folkhögskola in Örebro, for instance in how to audiodescribe films of different genres. In connection with a conference on Accessible cinema in 2015, the jury of a contest gave their criteria for how to evaluate the different ways of audio describing a scene from a film. Their criteria were: content and relevance (balance between "the whole" picture and which details that have to be described and which ones can you skip), tempo (incl timing) and empathy. Explain, for instance, unexpected sounds where they appear, adjust your voice and empathy to the atmosphere of the film. There should be even more criteria - like the technical sound quality, and that the audio description is in a good language and that the speaker (not always the audio descriptor) has a good voice. The writer of this article is herself a trained audio descriptor and she is also teaching her students some audio description when she is a Swedish teacher in Poland and Japan. Research on audio description is more and more established, internationally and in Sweden. The Swedish AD research at Lund university is focused on cognitive science and carried out in close contact with people with visual impairment and their organisations, The Institute for Interpreting and Translation Studies, and professional audio descriptors. |
