The use of audio description by blind and visually impaired people

Abstract

This paper investigates audio description (AD) to blind people. Resource that consists in transcribing situations of a visualized scene to orality, Aiming to know what they have to say about the experience of watching a short film with AD, in order to identify the challenges that exist in translating the visual image into orality and how it contributes to the understanding of the story as well as the action it works in their lives. Four teens, aged about twelve and fifteen, has been participated in the study. They watched “Today, I Don't Want to Go Back Alone”, available on a video channel (Youtube), they had to say what they understood and the role of AD in helping their understanding. Filming and transcription were made for analysis based on the cultural historical approach. Researchers found that the resource is hardly used by the teens, who mentioned difficulties in understanding dialogues in some moments, highlighting how important is hear the voice intonation of the characters and other sounds that could give clues to events such as pauses in speech, silences, music, indicating to researchers that the resource needs to be accessible and elaborated in order to collaborate with the production of meanings.