Hi there,
Welcome to our Enhancing Audio Description Newsletter, where we’ll keep you updated on our latest events, podcast releases, and research progress.
DARCI 2025 Conference News
We’re excited to share updates about our upcoming DARCI 2025 conference, scheduled for September 10–12 at the University of York’s School of Arts and Creative Technologies. Since announcing, we’ve received enthusiastic submissions across theatre, film, television, music, gaming, interactive media, heritage, and more.
Accepted authors will participate in a diverse programme featuring keynote speakers Raymond Antrobus and Prof. Hannah Thompson, along with pre-conference workshops on Wednesday. Abstracts and bios for these two keynotes and the workshops are available online, with the full conference programme coming soon.
Registration is now open, with early bird registration closing on June 30th, 2025. Tickets can be booked on Ticketsolve.
DARCI Podcast and Blog Posts
In December, Professor Hannah Thompson joined us to discuss the intersections of critical disability studies and French studies. Her perspectives as a partially blind academic and activist are invaluable, and she will be delivering one of our keynote talks in September.
The January episode had Mariana interviewing Sanjit Samaddar, an expert in interactive media who explores the intersection of user experience, design, and accessibility and in February we featured Gabriela Ortiz from Percepciones Textuales, based in Buenos Aires, delving into her work in accessibility within the Argentinian and Latin American contexts. This month brought us Gonzalo Iturregui Gallardo, a freelance media accessibility expert discussing contemporary performance challenges, effective communication using audio introductions and metaphors, and the connections between disability studies, queer, and feminist translation. Catch up with all these insightful episodes on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or read the accompanying transcriptions on our website using the hyperlinks provided above.
In addition to podcast episodes, we’ve published several blog posts. In January we reflected on an interview with Mariana for the podcast The Rest Is Just Noise, in which she discusses the EAD methods with Hasina Begum, as well as delving into other research work and wider academic matters. In February we also shared on our website the RNIB report written by our intern Emily Woods focusing on improving AD for television documentaries.
Research News
The team has now completed work on the short film ‘Aspectum’ by Jack Morris, James Edward Kilpatrick and Michael Regan, on Charles Bonnet Syndrome. We will be making the film available online with our EAD track in the coming months.
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
