Join the Disabled Students Network for our first guest speaker of the year to help kick off Disability History Month! Dr Alejandro Bolanos-Garcia-Escribano is an Associate Professor in Audiovisual Translation at UCL who teaches (audiovisual) translation and Spanish language and culture at both the Centre for Translation Studies (CenTraS) and the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies (SPLAS). He was the Programme Director of the MSc in Translation & Technology at CenTraS and has many impressive titles.
See below the brief of his amazing talk!
Audiovisual translation and media accessibility have outgrown the margins of translation studies scholarship and are now considered academic disciplines in their own right. Besides increasing academic interest, the greater availability of audiovisual products (e.g. films, series, documentaries, corporative videos, and training courses) and the pivotal role that media accessibility has acquired in recent years (Greco, 2018) have consistently placed media localisation services among the top services offered by most translation companies (Nimdzi, 2024). Industry-wide efforts in the field of media accessibility have been mainly driven by international legislation, such as Article 30 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (United Nations, 2006). In the UK, key legislation includes the Communications Act 2003, the Equality Act 2010 and Ofcom’s Code on Television Access Services (2012/2024), following which films, series and shows are made accessible for persons with sensory impairments, though the extent of these access services is unequal across television broadcasters, cinemas and on-demand services (see Ofcom, 2023).
Common media accessibility practices such as closed captioning and audio description are widely used in the creative industries, including traditional media, like TV or cinema, but also the performing arts, video games, museums and galleries and film festivals, to name but a few. Relegated to a second plane in the creation process nonetheless, accessibility is often thought about at post-production stages (aka post-synchronisation), thereby limiting the extent to which certain practices can be implemented (e.g. time restrictions). Against this backdrop, newer approaches are currently looking into the potential of embedding accessibility before and during the filmmaking process to limit these restrictions and maximise opportunities to make content accessible for all (see Romero-Fresco, 2019).
In this talk, I will argue that media accessibility practices, especially when considered from pre-production stages, meet a twofold purpose – providing access and enhancing inclusion. Audiovisual productions are not necessarily accessible to all viewers when a translation is commissioned (e.g. dubbing or subtitling), and the onus is on film producers to embed accessibility from early production stages. In light of the most recent publication of Ofcom’s accessibility guidelines (April 2024), the question I will therefore address in my talk is whether or not films are always accessible for all and discuss its implications for the creative industries.