AD tours

This chapter focuses on audio description (AD) tours for visually impaired people, namely pre-recorded AD tours that group together related ADs of diverse art items and guide museum and gallery users through a logical and coherent itinerary. It encompasses a definition of source text in the museum and gallery context and exemplifies the working stages of AD tour creation, their structure, textual organisation, and the most relevant communicative moves and linguistic specificities. These include the extensive use of directive movement verbs (especially turn and walk) and be as a verb of existence rather than a copula. It further includes the reliance on diverse listener-engaging strategies to keep visitors’ attention and establish their trust, and the extensive use of directional language and orientation instructions (i.e. specific types of procedural discourse), which represent approximately 12% of the total AD tour texts.