Audio Description (hereafter referred to as AD) is an access service which helps blind and partially sighted people “to access audiovisual contents including film and theater performances by using quiet moments in the original to provide a ver bal description of the actions, scenery, body language, and other relevant details” (Braun, 2007, p. 357). This practice, in its informal form of sighted individuals narrating visual events to people with visual impairment, has a long‑standing his tory. Known by various names such as “video description”, “descriptive video ser vice”, “audiodescription”, and “descriptive narration” among others (Clark, 2001; Fryer, 2016; Hernández‑Bartolomé & Mendiluce Cabrera, 2009; Piety, 2004), AD is applicable across diverse settings like movies, live performances, and museums, rather than restricted to videos. The nature and features of AD as an explanation process involving translation from visual components in any audiovisual message to suitable sound information naturally make it a highly valuable research topic of translation studies. For exam ple, AD is referred to as “an intersemiotic passage transforming images into vivid narration” (Matamala & Orero, 2007, p. 329), or, as Braun (2008, p. 14) describes, a media access service “translating visual images into verbal descriptions”. Traditionally, as a form of “intermodal or cross‑modal translation” (Braun, 2008, p. 17), with information received through one sensory mode (vision) being transferred into information that can be received through another (audition), AD is largely studied as an aspect of AVT, concerning mainly the production, reception, and products of AD as well as the contexts within which it occurs (Kruger, 2019). However, unlike screen‑based AD, live AD may be better conceptualized as audiovisual interpreting (Braun, 2008), which shares with interpreting practices a similar set of factors that govern the exchange for interpreting, such as constraints provided by technology, the field or subject matter, the tenor role and relationships, and the mode or communication channel (Cf. Fryer, 2016).
