This series of three articles focuses on audio description as an aid for visitors with a visual impairment. The idea is to understand what it’s all about, but above all to go into the details of how it’s conceived when you’re a cultural professional: what are the points to watch out for? what are the debates that arise? how can we offer audio description that comes as close as possible to the needs and expectations of visually impaired visitors?
This first introductory episode focuses on the target audience, the visitors who are visually impaired. In order to offer them appropriate solutions, we need to know about their disability and the nuances it covers.
In France, 1.7 million people suffer from mild, moderate or profound visual impairment. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), this figure is set to double by 2050, as life expectancy increases and the world’s population ages. From the point of view of universal accessibility, including to cultural venues, adapting content for cultural interpretation is a major challenge. The French Federation of the Blind (Fédération des Aveugles de France) distinguishes three types of visual impairment, depending on the degree of blindness:
- Total blindness: sufferers have no perception of light (nor therefore of colours, contrasts, shapes…);
- Profound blindness: residual vision is limited to distinguishing silhouettes and is therefore very blurred, although slightly more sensitive to light;
- Moderate visual impairment: visual incapacity is severe, and, at a distance, it is considered impossible to distinguish a face at 4 meters, while at close range, reading is impossible.
It’s also interesting to distinguish the origin of the impairment: is it a birth defect, or did it appear afterwards? The reception of audio description content will then be different; for example, the visual references evoked will have less resonance with people whose visual impairment is from birth. This invites us to combine different types of devices that appeal to a plurality of senses – a point we’ll discuss in the second article.
This brief summary of visual impairments underlines the diversity of the realities they cover. This raises the question of the “right” tool for facilitating access to culture for people who are visually impaired: how can we offer these visitors an aid adapted to the diversity of their profiles? While audio description has so far proved to be the most appropriate and common solution, a number of questions have arisen concerning the methods used to produce it. What content should be included? How should it be formulated, with what tone and vocabulary? Who should be involved throughout the production chain? Or how can audio description be combined with other mediation tools? We’ll discuss and illustrate these questions in the next article!