Accessing meaning-making by sighted and blind consumers of multimodal texts

Beskrivning

Multimodal texts play an important role in modern society. They can be studied both from a production and reception perspectives. Whereas the production aspect focuses on how the resources of text, images and graphics are deployed (O’Halloran et al., 2012, Jewitt 2014, Kress & Van Leeuwen 2006), the reception aspect emphasizes how multimodal texts are perceived by the users (Holsanova et al. 2006, 2008, Holsanova 2014a,b). I will show how eye-tracking measurements, in combination with other methods can be used to study reception of multimodality. However, not everybody can perceive the multimodal interplay. Blind people may miss important information that is only expressed by images. One way to increase the accessibility is audio description (AD) that provides a richer understanding and experience. The task of the audio describer is to select relevant information from images and express it verbally/aurally. The challenge is to assess what to describe, how to describe it, and when to describe it (Holsanova 2015, 2016). I will illustrate how meaning-making processes during AD of a Swedish popular scientific journal can be uncovered by concurrent think-aloud protocols.

Period	2018 nov 7
Evenemangstitel	Discourse, multimodality and experimental methods
Typ av evenemang	Konferens
Plats	Vina del Mar, Chile
Omfattning	Internationell