Enriching Audio Description of Film by Using the Novel

Audio description (AD) of films is a way of making films accessible for blind audiences by inserting a description of relevant visual elements into dialogue gaps in the original soundtrack. AD guidelines support the “what you see is what you say” principle, thus, they limit the many possibilities of reflecting the rich multiple layers of meaning contained in films. Going beyond this limitation, this research proposes that in the cases of films adapted from a novel, such novel is used as a source for writing the filmic AD. At the crossroads between audiovisual translation studies and literary studies, the research is organized around two key phases: the first is a production of an AD for an excerpt from The Hours, directed by Stephen Daldry, by using the novel from which the film is adapted and the second is a comparative analysis between this new AD and the AD supplied with the commercial DVD. Challenging one of the maxims of AD, this thesis is a modest, but a convincing step towards pushing the limits of AD for an enriched filmic experience for the blind.