Introduction and methodological considerations

Audio description (AD) is a form of accessible audiovisual translation that has become increasingly common in contemporary cultural institutions to make visual content accessible to people who are blind or visually impaired. It involves providing a verbal rendering of the salient visual aspects of a given cultural product, often in the form of a pre-recorded, pre-planned, edited, narrative-descriptive script that is delivered orally and consumed aurally. AD can be applied to a variety of semiotically complex settings to make them accessible to visually impaired individuals and ensure experiential equivalence whenever visual elements are integral to the meaning of the source text. Most AD tours, especially touch tours, are unscripted, and ADs can date from different periods. Another limitation relates to how it may not always be possible to set an AD in its authentic context and analyse it accordingly; the larger the corpus, the more difficult it is for researcher to directly experience each AD within its own context.