Age-oriented audio description

The paper describes an ongoing project which is aimed at creating age-oriented audio description. The project is part of a bigger one - ‘Homer’ – a project by Murmansk Arctic State University in the Murmansk region the purpose of which is to provide media accessibility for people with low vision and those hard of hearing. The project analyzed in the paper looks into the peculiarities of providing audio description aimed at people of different ages with severe vision impairment and complete blindness. The participants of the project were divided into five major groups, the division being based on the age groups: Children (0-9); Teens (10-14); Youth/young (15-24); Adults (25-64); Seniors (65 and over). The fundamental idea which lies behind the division is that age differences in word and language processing affect the viewing process as a critical cognitive one. Audio description which gives a verbal picture of the screen images can affect the cognitive processes which take place during the perception of the media (films, cartoons, educational infographics, etc) because age differences in information processing are not taken into consideration at present – audio description provided by the modern media is age-neutral, i.e. the same for all ages. Reception studies show that it is possible to provide age-oriented audio description in Russian by using the data from eye-tracking studies and applying the results separately for each age group.