How the blind audiences receive and experience audio descriptions of visual events. A project presentation

We present a three-year multidisciplinary research project that started in 2019 and is funded by FORTE (Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare). The theoretical aim of the project is to gain a better understanding of the principles that underlie successful communication between the sighted and the blind via audio description (AD). The aim of a series of experiments is to identify similarities and differences in how the sighted and the blind understand, segment and experience visual, spatial as well as temporal properties of an event. The applied goal is to increase the quality of AD and to support the training of audio describers and AD practices, and ultimately facilitate the understanding and accessibility of visual information for the visually impaired.