Harnessing the potential of eye-tracking for media accessibility

This article presents an overview of eye-tracking research studies in the area of media accessibility carried out by the Audiovisual Translation Lab at the Institute of Applied Linguistics, University of Warsaw, in cooperation with the Interdisciplinary Center for Applied Cognitive Studies at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw (SWPS). Media accessibility is here understood as various tools providing access to audiovisual media content for people with sensorial disabilities: in the form of subtitles for those who are deaf or hard of hearing and in the form of audio description (AD) for those who are blind or partially sighted.

The article begins with a brief discussion of various applications of eye-tracking to audiovisual translation and media accessibility, and then continues with a presentation of the following four studies carried out by the authors of this article: (1) on subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing (SDH) as the Polish contribution to the DTV4ALL project, (2) an on-going study on SDH on digital television, (3) audio description in education, and (4) audio description in art.