Users’ reception of minority and creative approaches to visual art audio description

Greco (2018) identifies three shifts in the various disciplines that deal with accessibility, the second being a movement from a maker- to a user-centered approach that has resulted in a proliferation of reception studies in Media Accessibility (Di Giovanni & Gambier 2018). According to Romero (2021), this shift is also present in accessible filmmaking, where collaboration between filmmakers and accessibility experts is leading to increased creativity and deviations from standard practices. In the film audio description (AD) field, a number of reception studies (Bardini 2020, Walczak and Fryer 2017, Ramos 2016, Szarkowska 2013, Fryer and Freeman 2012) have dealt with AD styles that offer an alternative to the standard recommended by guidelines and implemented by a majority of professionals. For visual art AD, one study has analyzed the reception of the majority style found in visual art AD guidelines and resources in this field with a focus on cultural references (Neves 2016), while another study has analyzed the amount of information and use of interpretive descriptions in connection with a universal-design approach to creating audio guides for art museums (Szarkowska et al. 2016). This paper presents a reception study of different visual art AD styles that follows a focus group methodology and draws on experience- and dialogue-based art education theories and methods (Burnham & Kai-Kee 2011). The goal of this study is to analyze the reception of the majority AD style as identified in corpus-based studies (Luque & Soler 2020, Perego 2019, Soler 2016, 2018 and 2019) and recommended by existing guidelines (ADC 2008, Giansante, RNIB & VocalEyes 2003, Salzhauer et al. 2003), which we refer to as the “objective” style, along with minority and more creative styles also found among current practices (Soler 2021). To this end, we meet with a small group of collaborators regularly for several weeks. For each session, they are sent in advance a set of materials consisting of alternative ADs for the same artwork and images of it. We discuss their experience of the work first, followed by their impressions of the different ADs. The results provide a valuable insight into the reception of different approaches to visual art AD.