Making media work for everyone: Improving comprehension and enjoyment of audiovisual content for cognitively diverse people
Start date
December 2025End date
OngoingSummary
Digital media is now central to daily life, but its complex audiovisual formats often exclude people with learning disabilities, creating barriers to information, culture, and social participation. Our Accessible Cues (ACs) project has shown that adding carefully designed prompts can make audiovisual content easier to access, leading to improved comprehension, enjoyment, and confidence. Building on this, we now explore working with charities, cultural organisations, and accessibility providers to co-develop practical resources and applications of ACs. The ultimate goal is to ensure that cognitively accessible media becomes a standard feature, fostering greater independence, inclusion, and equality for people with learning disabilities.
Aims and objectives
Our research improves access to audiovisual media for people with cognitive disabilities, who are often excluded because of difficulties in processing and understanding complex audiovisual content. We developed Accessible Cues (ACs), a novel mode of accessible communication that integrates explanatory commentaries, captions, and symbols into audiovisual material to support comprehension. Grounded in narrative theory and co-designed with users, our research shows that ACs improve comprehension, immersion, and attention without diminishing enjoyment.
The project aims to produce a set of practical resources tailored to different stakeholder groups. For charities, we will create concise guidance notes and adaptable templates to support the production of cognitively accessible audiovisual content. These will be piloted with partners and refined based on feedback, laying the groundwork for a more comprehensive toolkit. For cultural organisations, we will prepare examples showing how ACs can be integrated into theatre and film festival contexts.
For accessibility providers and industry stakeholders, we will develop a short discussion paper outlining the rationale for ACs, possible commercial pathways, and initial reflections on the role of AI in scaling production. A final internal report will synthesise stakeholder experiences and lessons learned across the project. Where appropriate, academic dissemination (e.g. a co-authored article on collaborative methods) may follow, but the emphasis will be on non-academic, user-oriented outputs.
People
Professor Sabine Braun
Professor of Translation Studies; Director, Centre for Translation Studies; Co-Director, Surrey Institute for People-Centred AI
Biography
I am a Professor of Translation Studies, Director of the Centre for Translation Studies, and a Co-Director of the Surrey Institute for People-Centred Artificial Intelligence at the University of Surrey in the UK. From 2017 to 2021 I also served as Associate Dean for Research and Innovation in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Surrey.
My research explores the integration and interaction of human and machine in translation and interpreting, for example to improve access to critical information, media content and vital public services such as healthcare and justice for linguistic-minority populations and other groups/people in need of communication support. My overarching interest lies in the notions of fairness, trust, transparency, and quality in relation to technology use in these contexts.
For over 10 years, I have led a programme of research that has involved cross-disciplinary collaboration with academic and non-academic partners to improve access to justice for linguistically diverse populations. Under this programme, I have investigated the use of video links in legal proceedings involving linguistic-minority participants and interpreters from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives. I have led several multi-national research projects in this field (AVIDICUS 1-3, 2008-16) while contributing my expertise in video interpreting to other projects in the justice sector (e.g. QUALITAS, 2012-14, Understanding Justice, 2013-16, VEJ Evaluation, 2018-20). I have advised the European Council Working Party on e-Law (e-Justice) and other justice-sector institutions in the UK and internationally on video interpreting in legal proceedings and have developed guidelines which have been reflected in European Council Recommendation 2015/C 250/01 on ‘Promoting the use of and sharing of best practices on cross-border videoconferencing’.
In other projects I have explored the use of videoconferencing and virtual reality to train users of interpreting services in how to communicate effectively through an interpreter IVY, 2011-3; EVIVA, 2014-15, SHIFT, 2015-18).
A further example of my work on accessibility is my research on audio description (video description) for visually impaired people. In the H2020 project MeMAD (2018-21) I have recently investigated the feasibility of (semi-)automating AD to improve access to media content that is not normally covered by human AD (e.g. social media content).
In 2019, the Research Centre I lead was awarded an ‘Expanding Excellence in England (E3)' grant (2019-24) by Research England to expand our research on human-machine integration in translation and interpreting. As part of this, I am currently leading and involved in a number of pilot studies aimed at better human-machine integration in different modalities of translation and interpreting.
The insights from my research have informed my teaching in interpreting and audiovisual translation on CTS’s MA programmes and the professional training courses that I have delivered (e.g. for the Metropolitan Police Service in London).
From 2018-2021 I was a member of the DIN Working Group on Interpreting Services and Technologies and co-authored the first standard on remote consecutive interpreting worldwide (DIN 8578). I am a member of the BSI Sub-committee Terminology. From 2018-2022, I was the series editor of the IATIS Yearbook (Routledge) and am currently associate series editor for interpreting of Elements in Translation and Interpreting (CUP) and a member of the Advisory Board of Interpreting (Benjamins). I was appointed to the sub-panel for Modern Languages and Linguistics for the Research Excellence Framework REF 2021.
Professor Constantin Orasan
Professor of Language and Translation Technologies
Biography
I am Professor of Language and Translation Technologies at the Centre of Translation Studies, University of Surrey, UK, and a Fellow of the Surrey Institute for People-Centred Artificial Intelligence. Before starting this role, I was Reader (Associate Professor) in Computational Linguistics at the University of Wolverhampton, UK, and the deputy head of the Research Group in Computational Linguistics at the same university. I hold a PhD in computational linguistics and a BSc in computer science.
With over 25 years of experience in the fields of Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and Linguistics, I have established myself as a leading researcher in the development of technologies that facilitate access to information. My PhD was in automatic summarisation, and I have led projects on question answering, text simplification, and translation technologies. Notable projects that I have led are EmpASR, an AHRC-funded project focused on training interpreters on how to benefit from the latest developments in artificial intelligence; HarnessingNLP4Court, a UKRI-funded project focused on facilitating access to legal information; the EXPERT project, an Initial Training Network (ITN) funded under the EU’s FP7 to train the next generation of world-class researchers in the field of data-driven translation technology; and the FIRST project, which developed language technologies for making texts more accessible to people with autism.
My current research is interdisciplinary, focusing on the intersection of AI, NLP, and translation studies. In recent years, I have increasingly focused on the practical application of NLP to support translators and interpreters. My recent publications explore reference-less translation evaluation, the processing of multilingual content in low-resource settings, the use of automatic speech recognition to support interpreters, and the use of large language models in text accessibility. My research is well known as a result of over 150 peer-reviewed articles in journals, books, and international conferences.
I am currently leading an EPSRC-funded project focused on making science accessible, and I am Co-Director of the ADA Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarships Network. More information about my work can be found at https://dinel.org.uk/.
For enquiries or potential collaboration on this topic please contact Prof Sabine Braun, the Principal Investigator of the project.
See other research projects carried out at the Centre for Translation Studies.
Research themes
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