In this episode Mariana interviewed Gabriela Ortiz from Percepciones Textuales. Based in Buenos Aires, she explores her work in the field of accessibility as well as the Argentinian and Latin American context.
Transcription of the podcast episode:
Mariana: Hello everyone, welcome to this new episode of the DARCI podcast, the podcast on Disability Accessibility and Representation in the Creative Industries. My name is Mariana López, and I’m a professor in sound production and postproduction at the University of York. And today, I have the pleasure of welcoming Gabriela Ortiz.
Gabriela Ortiz is an American Translators Association certified translator, English into Spanish, based in Buenos Aires with over 25 years of experience as freelance, English, German and Latin into Spanish translator and editor. She has a BA in translation from University of Buenos Aires and a postgraduate diploma in audio-visual translation and accessibility from Escuela Lenguas Vivas, Spangenberg, Buenos Aires. Most recently, she has presented at the ITI Conference in Edinburgh, Languages and the Media in Berlin and the ATA Annual Conference in Miami. Other than that, Gabriel is an amateur ballet and theatre jazz dancer, an avid reader, and a lover of plants and flowers.
Hi, Gabi. How are you doing? Thank you so much for joining us today.
Gabriela: Hi, Mariana. Nice to see you!
Mariana: How are you? How is it? Is it morning for you over there?
Gabriela: It’s morning. We’re just beginning spring. So it’s a very nice days here in Buenos Aires.
Mariana: Oh well. Great to hear. It’s quite cold here in York today.
Gabriela: Oh, sorry.
Mariana: [laughing] Well, thank you so much for joining us for this episode. I’m really excited to hear about your work in the field of accessibility, and I know Gabi, that you work as a key member of PERCEPCIONES TEXTUALES, an accessibility company. And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about how you started working in the field and what makes you passionate about accessibility?
Gabriela: Oh, OK. Uh, back in 2014, I was looking for ways to advance my translation career. I am a translator originally, and I just was looking for ways to advance it, to change a little bit my my path in the career. So I went to a presentation at Lenguas Vivas Spangenberg, which is a very well known government run school here in Buenos Aires. Translation school in Buenos Aires. And there was a presentation about post graduate programme in accessibility and audio visual translation by María Laura Ramos and Cecilia Fister, two professors who created that programme. And as I heard them, their presentation of the curriculum and what it was about. I thought, I thought it was a perfect match for what was I was looking for. Actually María Laura Ramos is one of the members of PERCEPCIONES TEXTUALES. And we have been working in accessibility since 2016, as soon as I finished that programme. At that time, I had zero knowledge on accessibility. So everything was new to me and I couldn’t believe how exciting it was to find something that was an intersection of our abilities, our linguistic abilities as translators and human rights. So I think that’s what really got me into this new field.
Mariana: Oh, thank you so much. That’s a really exciting trajectory. And it shows in a way, an example of how people get into different fields linked to accessibility from different… from different perspectives. And I was wondering what is the most exciting project on accessibility that you have worked on? Can you tell us a little bit about it?
Gabriela: Yeah. In this year, in this almost 10 years that we have we have been working, we have had many exciting opportunities and a few backlashes I might say. Mostly linked to political sways, because, as you know, accessibility many times is linked to politics, mostly in Latin America. And so, for example, I can mentioned that we were the organisers of the first ever, of the largest Film Festival in Buenos Aires called BAFICI. And there was so much interest among blind and partially sighted users that they literally came from all Argentina in buses. So we made a lot of fuss!
Mariana: Wow!
Gabriela: It was very unusual to see this long queue of blind and partially sighted members, users at a movie theatre in Recoleta downtown Buenos Aires. And it was very, very exciting. And we had the pleasure to organise these screening. … for every year after that, until the pandemic when we did a kind of hybrid screening that was the opening screening of the children’s section at that film festival. And we did a very interesting film for children called Clarita’s Universe, about a girl astronomer by Thomás Lipgot. So that was very, very nice. Unfortunately, we haven’t had the chance to continue with those screenings, but we hope that we will be able soon.
Mariana: Well, that sounds so exciting and it kind of shows that when these events are kind of put on, people do want to go to them, don’t they?
Gabriela: Yeah.
Mariana: And what do you find personally the most rewarding and the most challenging aspects of the job? And you kind of made a passing mention about backlashes that might happen sometimes.
Gabriela: Yes, well. I say that without any doubt, the possibility to have actual contact with the users of our work is one of the most rewarding aspects of our work. Followed by this is the chance to work with the production team and really understand where you stand in the whole production process.
Mariana: Yeah.
Gabriela: To be able to to work, to contribute with sound engineers and cinematographers, as much as possible. Because this is rather new here in South America, it’s difficult to get them into into the team, into the accessibility team, but we try to do that as much as possible. But without any doubt, the direct contact with our users we use… we have our blind validators for our work. So, this allows us to understand really what they need and the purpose of our work. And that’s a brilliant opportunity for us. And also I must say, regrettably that without any doubt, funding is the most challenging aspect in our work here. I think this is the greatest barrier to accessibility many times. It is easy to overcome that, but together. Third, lack of awareness and lack of funding are that impairs progress in a this, in our field many times, unfortunately. And if you want to know any more about the political side of this, for example, I mention that with our last government move, [they] moved back the accessibility administration to the Ministry of Health, which [is] a very very painful movement backwards for me.
Mariana: Yeah. One of the things that really, I was really interested when you were talking; the most rewarding parts of the job you talked, of course, about [is] the very important part of work with audiences, but also you touched on the importance of talking and collaborating with production companies to make sure that accessibility kind of is, let’s say, true to to their production. And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about what those collaborations are like. So do you collaborate with producers, with directors? So, how do you get involved in that process?
Gabriela: We have… It’s not that easy to to make them understand what… because as I said, this is rather new here in, in our area. Not so new, because we have 30 years of experience… but it was rather recently introduced. So we have tried because of our training, to collaborate, for example with sound engineers or music directors when trying to describe music for captions. But it’s not that easy! It it turns out that it’s not easy to describe music even for them, who created it.
Mariana: Yeah.
Gabriela: First of all we try to get in touch with directors, but if possible with the original creators of the soundtrack or original music for the film. And to our surprise, with some of them, we have been told that “we notice things about colours or symmetry in the film” that they even have of course planned, but they even hadn’t noticed that much. And then of course, we tried to have them prove our script, audio description scripts and then it is also proved by a blind user. So we try to… we haven’t got yet to the point where we can have that made in production.
Mariana: Yeah.
Gabriela: This is usually made in post production.
Mariana: And do you find there is a difference between communicating ideas that have to do with captioning versus audio description? So is there one of them that maybe is easier to kind of put the message across with production companies?
Gabriela: Yeah. Yeah, definitely audio description because I think, I don’t know if it’s something about Argentine scene filmmaking… Sorry about my Spanish! But, sound design, I well… I don’t think it’s very much, uh, I can’t say it’s not developed, but it’s not given the same importance, maybe a more, more importance is placed on image. But I’m I’m not sure about that. Our experience is, we have tried to work with a musician who creates original music for theatre to find ‘synesthetic’ – do you say in English? – ways to describe music for captioning.
Mariana: OK. Yeah.
Gabriela: And it’s very, very hard. But even for them!
Mariana: Yeah.
Gabriela: To try to to put music or sounds into words.
Mariana: Yeah, no, I imagine! It is quite a diff… Because even when I work in sound design projects, I find that sometimes you have to explain, yeah, something you did that is kind of sonically… and yeah, it’s quite… it’s a quite hard thing to do and sometimes you end up using these metaphors that you’re not sure if there are that clear to anyone but one oneself. So that’s really interesting. A few years ago I had the pleasure… a couple of years ago only, only two years ago, I had the pleasure of hearing a great talk you gave for Languages and Media. The event in Berlin and you talked about accessibility and social media. And I was wondering if you could tell us what you think are the most important things people need to consider when thinking about accessibility for social media and what are the sort of things that they should really be avoiding? What shouldn’t they be doing?
Gabriela: OK. Thank you. Yeah, I remember you being there very, very enthusiastically. Thank you for that! [Mariana laughing]
Gabriela: I think one of the most overlooked facts about social media is that they all include accessibility features to some extent. So I mean, all of them, including LinkedIn, the most professional one, you have the possibility to add alternative texts or captions in some way or another. With captions it is not that straightforward, I should say, because automatic captions are still not good enough. But in PERCEPCIONES TEXTUALES, our approach to accessibility is that accessibility is a matter of human rights, universal design, and it is based on the social model of accessibility. So that means, it is our responsibility as society to be accessible.
Mariana: Yeah.
Gabriela: So, given that the features are there, are readily available, I find no valid reason not to be accessing. [both laughing] So it might take one or two extra steps before you post, you do your posting, but it makes every sense if you want to be diverse and accessible, and to promote a more equal society. So. What I should say is that there are no standards, no… no rules or fixed rules to follow. But there are good practises that you can find, for example, one very good account for that is the one by the Royal National Institute of the Blind, which you can find on X/Twitter as RNIB. That’s their handle. Or checking out resources that are widely available at the website, for example alttextaspoetry by two blind users, Coklyat and Finnegan. Who… they even give us a handbook of exercises to improve your alt text writing. So that that is a good practise to follow. For captions I would recommend at all costs to avoid the automatic captioning. Because I think that they give a false idea that you are being accessible, while you can be, quite on the contrary, not accessible at all. Because as we were talking of the relationship of deaf and hearing impaired people with sound and music, they may even lead to misunderstanding or confusion. So because what we were talking before about sound design, it is very difficult for them to understand how sounds are conveyed into text. So when they are not good enough, these captions, I think we should make the extra effort to do them well and to include our captions in our videos, for example to embed them. And for images, for still images. Sometimes, many times, I should say, people may create these flyers as they call them, with graphic formats that are loaded, for example, with information for any event, but they are completely inaccessible because you don’t have alternative text in them. So they really don’t fulfil their purpose. And then another one another benefit that is often overlooked is that because web crawlers get into these alternative text, you improve your SEO positioning so it’s good for Search Engine Optimization, but that’s not the real purpose of doing this, but it’s an extra benefit.
Mariana: Yes. Yeah. And I sometimes feel that it’s good for people to know those extra benefits because, of course, a great part of the population we hope will just care, as you say, because it’s the right… is a social responsibility, it’s the right thing to do. But we do know that there is a large proportion of people that will care more about things that lead to greater kind of, yes, visibility or engagement without being that engaged in the social aspects of things. So that’s really interesting. And there I have found in my experience there’s sometimes a real resistance towards making social media accessible, which often surprises me. And I have, I sometimes if I know someone I might, or maybe sometimes if I don’t either, I might say… you know, your image doesn’t have alt text. Have you thought about adding it? And I sometimes get responses like, oh, well, we don’t have time to do that or.
Gabriela: No.
Mariana: Or, you know, everything is super clear in my posts. So why would I describe an image? And I’m like, well, it isn’t really clear what the image is in your post and time wise… as you know, it just takes literally maybe one more minute, maybe even less.
Gabriela: Yeah, at at the most. And what I find very interesting, what RNIB do. Is that they take a very popular post, for example, by artists and they repost it with alt text and to show how easy it is to do it actually.
Mariana: Yeah.
Gabriela: And and they really write very, very artistic alternative text. So it’s very interesting to follow them, I think, and as you say it takes, it might take a little bit more, but not that much.
Mariana: No, no. Yes, I agree. I completely kind of agree with your opinion that the RNIB posts on alt texts can be quite funny as well in the way that they work about raising awareness are definitely worth a follow there. And one of the things I wanted to move on to is something that becomes very evident to I think anyone that works or engages in the field of research and practise of accessibility. How little we hear at conferences and events and even at how little there is in terms of publications about accessibility outside Europe and North America. So a lot of the field I personally feel is very dominated by European and North American practises. And Latin America is one of those regions in the world that is very underrepresented in this regard, which always saddens me a lot and I was wondering what, what are your perspectives on this? Why do you think there is such an under-representation and what could we do to change that?
Gabriela: Mm hmm, I believe that one of the main reasons is that, at least in my country, Argentina, our universities and higher education schools do not have these scholarship or grant programmes that are widely available in Europe and the US. So. Further to that, it is very very difficult to find, to get the very few research grants for social and sciences given by the National Research Council. So as a result of all these factors researchers must work their full time jobs and then conduct research on their spare time, so to say, with the very few resources they get. So it’s very, very difficult. One exception might be Brazil. In Brazil, I think they have been researching on accessibility for longer than the rest of the Spanish speaking, Latin American countries and they have major publications. Of course in Portuguese. And maybe English, but mostly in Portuguese. In any case, I can recall 3 accessibility groups led by women researchers, which is extra interesting for me. One of them is here working at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba in Argentina, which is a very well known and renowned university. Public, I mean free university in charge of Marta Pereira. She was working on accessibility to academic materials and audio description as well. Another one, led by Elena Santiago Bigata. You might know Elena because she usually attends the events where we meet. She works at Universidade de Brasília, and pardon my Portuguese. And the third one, led by Florencia Faccioli, who is part of the accessible filmmaking group. She’s working at Universidad Católica del Uruguay. So you get the southernmost part of South America, with some kind of accessibility. Of course, there might be other research groups that I am not personally aware of, but these three I think it’s worth mentioning.
Mariana: Oh, thank you so much. Yes.
Gabriela: And what we could do to change that, that’s a tricky question because as private persons, we cannot do much!
Mariana: Yeah.
Gabriela: Because. It’s very, very difficult to change that. Down… from down upwards. I think this is very much inherent in how universities work here in our area.
Mariana: Yeah, absolutely. I think as well there is a role. I always think there’s a role about kind of making sure that there’s opportunities open as well for people to present their work and share in, you know, it could be in the form of bursaries for people to be able to, to kind of attend events. Because as you said, you know it’s really important and I think it’s really important that you highlighted this, a lot of people in Latin American are doing their full time jobs and then at the weekends they’re trying to do the research with many times almost 0 funding or very, very few resources. So I think, I think organisations could also, I think be looking into creating spaces and opportunities for people. To to be able to access and share their work through bursaries and others, I think that might be a nice thing to do as well.
Gabriela: Yeah. And I think they with the very few resources they get, they have to most part, they have to choose where to put them. So it’s very, very hard.
Mariana: Yeah, absolutely. But thank you so much for highlighting the work of those research groups. And I’m sure our listeners will be looking them up. I will definitely be looking at them up to find out more about their work. And my next question is what is next for you? Do you have any exciting projects lined up that you can tell us about?
Gabriela: OK. Yeah. Well, umm, unfortunately, the prevailing situation in our country right now is very, very hard because as I said before, the disability administration was moved back to the Ministry of Health. That is atrocious for us, so we believe that it is time to maybe back up a little bit, but continue to advocate for what we think are the principles of our work. As I said, human rights and universal design and the social model of disability. Lately we have been working with uh screen AD mostly for various production houses and streaming platforms. I must say that many, many of the government run initiatives are shut down right now so, but some work still, for example, we work for the National Board of Film Institutes of the Mercosur. It’s called the RECAM. And we produce the ID for the winners of their short film competition. We have been doing that for, I think, 2 years now. The first one was for children films and now it’s for adult short films. So and they are freely available on their platforms. In Portuguese and Spanish, which we love, that they are free and yeah, for everyone to enjoy. And right now we are working on a budget on a, on a quote for a massive Christmas event which will bring us back to live audio description. One of our main goals as we started, which would mean a lot of technical challenges because it’s an open air stadium, but of course we will see. [both laughing] So if we, if we get the gig, we are going to be facing a 36°C show [both laughing] one week before Christmas so… quite a challenge.
Mariana: I’m sure that listeners that are listening to the podcast that are based in the UK are probably thinking what 36° over Christmas?!
Gabriela: That’s what it’s like down here.
Mariana: And that kind of brings me to to follow up question if that’s OK. You mentioned kind of that one of your main goals was to actually do more live productions, live accessibility. I was wondering if you could tell us little bit about, what are the specific kind of challenges, but also excitements about doing live accessibility?
Gabriela: Yeah, well. The challenges, well, I always start with the challenges. I’m sorry about that, OK, the challenges of course is technology mostly because there are three or four systems out there. IR, UF and Wi-Fi, but here in Argentina, Wi-Fi systems are not available, so you have to bear in mind, all the frequencies that are around their live events. You had,… I don’t know how you call ‘retorno’?
Mariana: Like the ‘return’.
Gabriela: Yeah. But the return for a live events and Wi-Fi and people streaming on live events. If they are, for example, live shows. Theatre is another thing. But one of the main challenges is actually getting to work with the sound design systems, the teams, I’m sorry. And the excitement of course, is out there because you have to change your script on the fly, mainly because of the impro, that theatre live theatre entails. So we love that. But this is of course, it is of course a challenge.
Mariana: But sounds exciting as well.
Gabriela
Yeah, yeah. It’s just, it’s exciting, yes.
Mariana: Cool. I hope that all that comes comes through and there’s a final question I like asking actually all our guests. And the question is, what are your hopes for the future of accessibility in the creative industry? You can have more than one!
Gabriela: OK. Well, I think we are very hopeful here. And once we had a talk by Pilar Orero. Who I’m sure everyone knows, everyone working in accessibility knows. She was here in Buenos Aires when everything was starting. And she said you have the opportunity to make everything from scratch. Uh, maybe in Europe or Spain specifically, there are many standards that are long standing and nobody asks questions or challenges them. They just take them for granted and you have the opportunity to create everything from scratch. That’s good. So I hope, my hope is that once we just don’t have to discuss this, that it’s so widespread and known and people are so much aware of this. That users can go, can decide last minute to go to any event and they find everything they need. That’s my wildest hope I think.
Mariana: And what s beautiful wish and hope for the future. Thank you so much, Gabi, for sharing all your knowledge in your field and your work in PERCEPCIONES TEXTUALES. And one very last thing! If people would like to work with you. And your colleagues in PERCEPCIONES TEXTUALES, how can they do that? How can they reach you and work with you?
Gabriela: Yeah, I should say that the easiest way to find us is, uh, on Instagram. Because you’ll find our video site there with all our links. I’m afraid when we choose our emails, we made them too long to spell out. But I give you. I’ll send it to you so you can write it on your transcript if you like. So but on Instagram, where you can find us as PERCEPCIONES TEXTUALES also. And I thank you so so much, Mariana. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you whenever we meet. Worthwhile. And. I appreciate your work so much. You give us hope!
Mariana: Oh, OK!
Gabriela: Yeah, that once we are going to be able to work. In, in most creative and creative aspects, and not that much on daily efforts, on daily tasks.
Mariana: Oh, thanks.
Gabriela: And we hope to join you in York next year.
Mariana: Thank you so much, Gabi! That’s incredibly kind of you. I do appreciate it very, very much and it’s always great to get the opportunity to chat with you. So thank you so much for joining us today.
Gabriela: Thank you.
Mariana: Huge thanks to all our listeners. I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I have and we’ll be back with a new guest next month.
Links
- Gabi’s email address can be found at PERCEPCIONES TEXTUALES.
