Audio introduction meets audio description. An Italian experiment

Access services for the blind and visually impaired have been gaining momentum within the audiovisual translation studies community: research, international projects and experiments have been flourishing and, by so doing, they have contributed to enhancing service provision. However, if audio description has been the object of attention for several years now, audio introduction has hardly ever been considered by the academic community. Yet, audio introduction was the first service to be provided for the blind and visually impaired in the early Eighties, for the enjoyment of live events and films. A project started in the UK in early 2012 and brought to Italy by the University of Macerata at the end of the same year, has aimed to bring audio introduction to the fore and to evaluate its function and relevance in conjunction with audio description. This paper aims to report on the complex experiment which led to testing the audio introduction and audio description of the Italian version of Slumdog Millionaire with a group of 20 blind individuals, in November 2012. The experiment, which started with the transcription, translation and adaptation of the English audio description available on DVD in the UK, and ended with the analysis of a set of three questionnaires administered to each blind participant, is the very first of its kind. This article provides a description of the whole experiment as well as a series of reflections on the results yielded by the questionnaires.