Hi there,
It’s the Enhancing Audio Description (EAD) team here, welcome to our first newsletter!
The goal of our newsletter is to keep you updated with the progress of our project, a project that seeks to explore the potential of sound design practices and spatial audio to provide accessible film and television experiences for visually impaired audiences. In addition to our own research progress, we will be including updates on dissemination events that we hope are of interest as well as information on our new podcast series.
Podcast
We launched our new podcast called DARCI, which stands for Disability, Accessibility, and Representation in the Creative Industries and already published three episodes. The first introduces the podcast and our project; the second is an interview with Joseph Inman, director of the short film Spines, funded by the British Film Institute and the third is an interview with Dr Anna Bramwell-Dicks, lecturer in interactive media at the University of York. You can access all the podcast episodes directly through Spotify and Acast, or you can also find the blog posts for these episodes on our website, with transcriptions, using the following hyperlinks:
Research News
One of the most important aspects of our project is working with professional film and television productions to integrate our EAD methods. We have recently completed two short films by working together with the creative teams. The first one was the BAFTA nominated Visible Mending directed by Samantha Moore, an animated documentary on “emotional repair through wool”. The second one was Spines, the first BFI Network-funded film to be written, directed, and starring an autistic person. You can read more about Visible Mending as well as watch both versions (with and without EAD) in our blog post here. When playing the video do make sure you change settings to ‘Audio Descriptions’ to access the EAD version. A short introduction to Spines can be found in this post.
We have also been working on data collection on how the EAD methods might adapt to convey cinematographic elements through sound. Examples of these elements are types of camera shots, camera angles and camera movements. One of the EAD methods that we work with in this study uses sound effects, for example, to provide information on actions, to elicit the presence of establishing shots, to convey abstract scenes or to indicate time, place and the presence of characters. The other method we’ve worked with in this study is surround sound spatialisation that can help convey the position of characters or objects portrayed on screen. This study used short clips from the TV show Emmerdale, produced by ITV, the feature film Notes on Blindness by Pete Middleton and James Spinney and the short film Ecce Homo by Dimitar Kutmanov. For each clip, we produced different sound design techniques that are compared in pairs to help identify the best technique for each type of cinematographic element.
We also now have a brand new logo thanks to the wonderfully talented Oswin Wan. The logo is very important to us to differentiate our methods of accessibility as being rooted in sound design and spatial audio and we hope to be able to use it moving forward in the end credits of productions we work on to identify the availability of EAD and our involvement in the project. Find out more here.
Events
And finally, we have two events coming up
- Our symposium this May in Edinburgh called Removing Barriers: Disability and Accessibility in the Creative Sector. Book your free ticket here.
- Our conference in September 2025 in York called Conference on Disability, Accessibility and Representation in the Creative Industries (DARCI). Find out more here.
Any questions, please feel free to email us on enhancingad@gmail.com. Social media updates on the project are added on Twitter/X @Mariana_J_Lopez and on Bluesky @marianajlopez.bsky.social
Thanks!
EAD team
