Intermodal coherence in audio descriptive guided tours for art museums

The aim of this article is to propose a method for designing audio descriptive guided tours with tactile exploration in art museums. It draws on existing guidelines as well as on descriptive and theoretical studies of this intersemiotic translation modality, and is illustrated with materials designed for the Describing Sorolla tour held at the Sorolla Museum by Kaleidoscope, an organization dedicated to fostering universal access to culture. In order to give a detailed description of the method proposed, a semantic analysis of the audio description of one of the paintings selected for the visit is carried out. The results from this analysis are in turn discussed in relation to the tactile image used during the tour and the verbal instructions given for its exploration to provide a better understanding of intermodal coherence as an essential element of the method proposed to build this type of multimodal discourse.