Audio describing text on screen
Title of edited book
Audio Description. New Perspectives Illustrated
Year of publication
In the film under analysis text on screen appears in various forms: logos and both opening and final credits, inserts and intertitles, words written on various objects (ledger, riffle, newspaper, etc. ), and subtitles. This chapter has described the many instances found and has suggested ways of approaching their audio description, taking into account the constraints posed by each particular scene. A short overview of the proposals found in the literature has also been presented, showing that logos and credits have attracted the attention of most guidelines. All in all, it has been demonstrated that text on screen often conveys meanings which help audiences make sense of the film and therefore it has to be carefully considered and integrated in the accessible version of the movie. The strategies to accomplish it successfully are varied, as previously described, and include diverging possibilities ranging from omission to a literal rendering of the text on screen. Moreover, the ways to indicate that text on screen is voiced are not uniform: the source of the text can be indicated (“A subtitle reads:” or “A caption:”) but other strategies can be used such as changing the intonation, using another voice, or including an earcon, among others. Despite the many possibilities, only a thorough film analysis of the many codes used in each scene by describers and continuous testing with blind and visually impaired audiences by researchers will provide the best answer, which will probably have to be flexible enough to adapt to the many possible situations.