Introducing AD

This chapter introduces audio description (AD) and relates it to semiotic complexity, multimodality, accessibility, usability, and broadly translation—i.e. transcreation. After defining semiotically complex texts and highlighting their recent growth and remarkable variety, the chapter focuses on the challenges of making them accessible for increasingly diverse audiences with different communicative needs. Specifically, AD, the transformation of visual images into words originally intended for blind and visually impaired audiences, is a powerful translation process, product, and service that can facilitate the inclusion of large sections of the population in participating in visual content. This chapter illustrates AD’s professional and academic history, defines its primary and secondary target users, and provides an overview of visual disability and its possible physical and cognitive consequences. Finally, the chapter explores the relevant linguistic features found in screen AD thus far, as this is the AD genre that has been the most extensively explored and practiced.