Search

My 4-year research project, funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie doctoral training programme, investigates, develops and tests innovative access options for blind and partially sighted (BPS) visitors, using new technologies within diverse museum environments. Working with Titanic Belfast and RNIB NI, I have pioneered three approaches that combine a commitment to low-cost accessibility solutions and emotionally engaged visitor experience. Altogether, the project contributes several methods to enrich AD for enhancing museum accessibility and visitor experience for BPS visitors both theoretically and practically.

The video tours of the Maze and Long Kesh Prison serve as powerful visible reminders of Northern Ireland's divided past. And yet, these video tours are not accessible to blind and partially sighted people in their original format. Taking this as its starting point, this thesis adopts a practice-based approach, which involves the experimentation and development of a series of descriptive guides of the video tours of the Maze and Long Kesh Prison for primarily blind and partially sighted audiences in Northern Ireland as part of the oral history project The Prisons Memory Archive. As one of the main sites of imprisonment in Northern Ireland during the thirty-year conflict, known as "the Troubles", the Maze and Long Kesh Prison remains a divisive symbol of Northern Ireland's recent past. Creating access to the PMA video tours of the Maze and Long Kesh Prison therefore necessitates a context-driven approach to accessibility that takes on board conflicting interpretations of the past through the integration of PMA participant recordings alongside the descriptive guides. This, in turn, forces a reassessment of some of the norms and conventions governing audio description research and practice, which recognises the important role the audio describer plays in shaping audiovisual media's translation and reception through their spoken delivery, detailed descriptions, and word choice. Through an exploratory study and main reception study with both blind and partially sighted as well as non-blind audiences across Northern Ireland, this research details the practicalities of a context-driven approach to the description of the PMA video tours of the Maze and Long Kesh Prison. To achieve this aim, a predominantly qualitative approach is adopted, which makes use of both questionnaires and audience feedback via focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews to assess and determine where and how the descriptive guides can best meet the needs of their potential end users. The results from both studies demonstrate the possibilities of alternative ways of practice in audio description. More broadly, the results of this research project widen the field of media accessibility studies and provide an additional lens through which to examine audio description norms and conventions. Moreover, the results of this research suggest the potential of alternative ways of practice in audio description that have regard for the sensitivities at play in the presentation of audiovisual material.

Although some conversations are taking place about dance practitioner accessibility as related to disability, many of the methods, tools, and guiding philosophies proposed by this body of work focus on molding disabled practitioners into existing conventions of dance technique, performance practices, and aesthetics. This framework results in creative practices that operate despite, not because of, disability. This limited view of disability is exemplified in traditional applications of Audio Description for dance, where, despite being an accessibility measure for disabled people, Audio Description—and by extension, disability—is treated as a barrier to overcome rather than as an artistically valuable contribution. Through the production of two new choreographic works, this thesis explores how Audio Description can be used as a generative choreographic tool that also centers disability in choreographic process. The first choreographic process explored Audio Description as a movement generator, and the second additionally explored Audio Description as a generator for narrative and environmental content. In centering the use of Audio Description as a generative choreographic tool, these choreographic processes facilitated Disability Justice-informed access for the artistic collaborators and centered disability itself toward the potential realization of a disability aesthetic in creating and presenting concert dance works.

Online video content has proliferated as a key source for information in the form of video lectures, vlogs, reviews, how-to’s, and more. A video hosting service, YouTube, is now the second most popular search platform and reaches 81% of internet users under 20. However, most online videos do not provide audio descriptions (AD), presenting serious barriers for blind and visually impaired (BVI) people who may lack access to the visuals.In this thesis work, I present Human-AI systems to make online videos more accessible. Specifically, by (1) understanding what makes videos accessible to blind and visually impaired people; (2) automatically surfacing already accessible video content on platforms like YouTube with computer vision and natural language processing algorithms; and (3) helping video authors efficiently detect and address visual and auditory accessibility issues in their video authoring process.

People with disabilities or functional diversity form a significant part of the population (15%) and access to communication is a right recognized by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CDPD) ratified by Spain in 2007. This study aims, on the one hand, to analyse the state of the art of accessibility services that are currently offered in a sample of seven Catalan-language TV stations; and, on the other hand, to put forward some suggestions for improvement based on user needs and demands in order to increase, both in terms of quality and quantity, the accessibility services available. A sample of seven broadcasters (namely, Televisió de Catalunya, Radiotelevisión Española, IB3 TV, betevé, 8tv, El Punt Avui TV and Girona TV) was analysed using different methodological approaches, allowing us to triangulate the data and, therefore, offer an overview of the current situation to identify new paths of work. The main conclusion is that, although Spanish television broadcasters are legally obliged to produce accessible content, this is still a pending topic for those included in our sample. It is hoped that this study will serve to denounce legal irregularities. Yet, it is also hoped that this analysis will pave the way for those in charge of granting equal access to the media, since our results offer a point to depart from for future improvements.