Accessible Cues (AC) to aid the understanding of audiovisual narrative for cognitively diverse audiences
The fine-tuning of Accessible Cues is an innovative Media Accessibility project revolving around the repurposing of Audio Description (AD), Audio Narrative (AN) and creative integrated captioning to overcome cognitive barriers in complex multimodal communication faced by cognitively diverse individuals. To reduce the cognitive load stemming from the presence of an additional verbal input, i.e., the AC themselves, Easy-to-Understand language varieties are used to reduce linguistic complexity while ensuring immersion when accessing audio-visual narratives. This doctoral project focuses on complex film storyworlds.
AVT; Media Accessibility; Audio Description; Audio Introductions; Creative Media Accessibility; Easy Language; Conference Interpreting; Community Interpreting.
Under the supervision of Professor Elisa Perego (University of Trieste) and Professor Anna Matamala (Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona) she has collaborated with stakeholders in the realm of Media Accessibility and Social Inclusion to create content for the EU project EASIT (Easy Access for Social Inclusion Training). Andreea has focused on Unit 3, regarding the application of Easy to Understand (E2U) language in Audio Description to improve access for users with visual impairment.
Easy-to-Understand (E2U) language varieties have been recognized by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities as a means to prevent communicative exclusion of those facing cognitive barriers and guarantee the fundamental right to Accessible Communication. However, guidance on what it is that makes language ‘easier to understand’ is still fragmented and vague, leading practitioners to rely on their individual expertise. For this reason, this article presents a quantitative corpus analysis to further understand which features of E2U language can more effectively improve verbal comprehension according to professional practice. This is achieved by analysing two parallel corpora of standard and professionally adapted E2U articles to identify adaptation practices implemented according to, in spite of or in addition to official E2U guidelines (Deleanu et al., 2024). The results stemming from the corpus analysis, provide insight into the most effective adaptation strategies that can reduce complexity in verbal discourse. This article will present the methods and results of the corpus analysis.
Easy-to-Understand (E2U) language varieties have been recognized by the United Nation's Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006) as a means to guarantee the fundamental right to Accessible Communication. Increased awareness has driven changes in European (European Commission, 2015, 2021; European Parliament, 2016) and International legislation (ODI, 2010), prompting public-sector and other institutions to offer domain-specific content into E2U language to prevent communicative exclusion of those facing cognitive barriers (COGA, 2017; Maaß, 2020; Perego, 2020). However, guidance on what it is that makes language actually 'easier to understand' is still fragmented and vague. For this reason, we carried out a systematic review of official guidelines for English Plain Language and Easy Language to identify the most effective lexical, syntactic and adaptation strategies that can reduce complexity in verbal discourse according to official bodies. This article will present the methods and preliminary results of the guidelines analysis.
