Accessibility from scratch. "Inclusive scriptwriting" as an additional tool for making TV news more accessible to blind or visually impaired audiences

Taking audiovisual translation as a starting point, this empirical and exploratory research project intends to propose solutions in order to improve the degree of accessibility in audiovisual materials addressed to people with sensorial limitations (deaf or hard-of-hearing, and blind or visually impaired). This project is based on the concept of accessible audiovisual production, whose objective is to integrate accessibility as a part of the audiovisual production process. This integration is intended to guarantee the maximum quality of audiovisual products, which are to be elaborated by taking into account both semiotic and linguistic factors from the very beginning, so that they can be easily translated and made accessible. In order to achieve this, the study aims at setting the theoretical basis to facilitate the collaboration among audiovisual producers and audiovisual translators. Within this context, results on the preliminary analysis of TV news will be here presented with a special focus on audio description.

TV news are not usually audio described on Spanish television. After selecting a collection of TV news formats, we analyzed the specific audio description needs of blind and visually impaired together with the filmic characteristics of the news. Our results show that some important visual information is not usually included in the aural dimension of some news formats. As audio describing TV news is not very feasible in the context of Spanish television, we propose to integrate accessibility in the phases of preproduction and postproduction through "inclusive scriptwriting" following the path of "integrated audio description" (Fryer, 2018).