Event segmentation in the audio description of films: A case study

To make the content of moving images and audio-visual media available to a visually impaired audience, a sighted interpreter can provide audio description (AD). AD is a verbal description of visual events, aiming to increase the accessibility of visual information and to provide a visually impaired audience with a richer and more detailed understanding and experience of, for instance, films. To achieve this goal, the audio describer critically needs to select what to describe, when to describe it, and how to describe it, as well as to express the information aurally. The prosperity of this communication is thus critically dependent upon basic cognitive processes of how the sighted audio describer perceives and segments the film’s unfolding chain of events and how the visually impaired end users conceive the structure, content, and segmentation of such events in relation to the produced AD. While the way in which we as human cognitive beings perceive, segment, and remember chain of events has been the matter of much research, there is virtually no research on this interplay in relation to AD. In the present case study, we scrutinize live AD of a film from two trained audio describers, and examine how events are structured, segmented and construed in their AD. Results demonstrate that the event segmentation structure experienced from the film is indeed a fundamental part of how AD is structured and construed. It was found that AD at event boundaries was highly sensitive to different spatiotemporal circumstances and this relationship depends on semantic resources for expressing AD.