‘Pictures painted in Words: ADLAB Audio Description guidelines’, a manual for audio describers, trainee audio describers and anyone involved in the audio description industry, marks the culmination and final ‘deliverable’ of the ADLAB project, financed by the European Union as part of the EACEA Lifelong Learning programme, and coordinated by the University of Trieste. The purpose of audio description (AD) is to provide a method whereby the blind and partially sighted community can gain access to audiovisual products of various types, though principally television and other screened material. It consists in creating a verbal description of the salient items that appear on screen, thereby providing access to the visual information accompanying the oral component of audio-visual material. ‘Pictures painted in Words’ provides an innovative approach to the preparation and training of audio describers in that the guidelines are not prescriptive or regulatory but ‘strategic’ in that alternative solutions are proposed depending on the context and particular characteristics of the situation presented in the audio-visual text. It is hoped that the results of these three years of dedicated research that has culminated in the publishing of this volume will be of assistance to all those involved in the exciting of AD for many years to come.
