Accessible filmmaking

Translation, accessibility and the viewing experience of foreign, deaf and blind audiences has long been a neglected area of research within film studies. The same applies to the film industry, which often underestimates the audience that exists for foreign and accessible cinema. Translated and accessible versions are usually produced with limited time, for little remuneration, and traditionally involving no contact with the creative team. This chapter presents accessible filmmaking (AFM) as an alternative approach, integrating translation and accessibility into the filmmaking process through collaboration between translators and filmmakers. After a brief introduction, Sect. 2 introduces the theoretical foundations of AFM: a wide, integrated (or proactive) and user-centric approach to media accessibility that covers both access to content and access to creation and a translation/media accessibility-oriented view of film studies. This is followed by an analysis of current research on AFM (Sect. 3) including the reception of creative subtitles and the history of AFM practices, an overview of current professional practice in this area with special emphasis on the director of accessibility and translation as a new professional figure (Sect. 4) and a final section with conclusions (Sect. 5).