Syntolkning som multimodal medierande aktivitet

Audio description (AD) offers people with visual impairments and blindness a richer and more detailed understanding and experience of film, theatre and other events by describing what is seen but not heard (Holsanova 2016b, 2020a). With the analysis of audio described film scenes, I will illustrate that AD is a complex meaning-making activity that cannot be limited to only replacing the visual part with a verbal part. Audio describers are aware of the interplay between the different modes of expression, create content links and take into account the meaning of the film sounds, music and dialogue when deciding what needs to be described from the visual scene, how it should be described and when. The goal of AD is to complement what is missing in the multimodal interplay in order to achieve a comparable understanding and experience of the non-sighted audience (Reviers 2017). Audio describers are thus engaged in a complex multimodal mediating activity (Braun 2007, Holsanova 2020a, 2021).