Transcript: Audio description and the autism spectrum

Roberta: A researcher in the UK has recently published an article, looks at how audio description can actually improve engagement and understanding for people on the autistic spectrum. Katie Couani, Marketing Communications Coordinator at Media Access Australia is here to tell us about the article’s interesting findings. Welcome Katie.

Katie:  Hi Roberta.

Roberta:Now, can you tell us a bit about this article?

Katie:  Yeah, sure. Well, the article comes from a UK researcher named Judith Garman, and she specialises in accessibility as well as a number of other things. And she’s been involved in user-testing television services for the BBC, so the British Broadcasting Corporation, over the past couple of years.

And the testing involved people on the autistic spectrum, so for example, you have autism or Asperger’s Syndrome, also quite common. So she basically discusses her observations from these studies of how people on this spectrum are respondent to audio description. And what she found is that having the audio description on, so on television, actually boosted their engagement and understanding, which is really interesting.

Roberta: Katie, we usually talk about audio description as something for people who are blind and vision impaired, but this article points to benefits for others too.

Katie:  Yeah, it does. We’ve talked about audio description a lot on the show, so just to recap, it’s those descriptions of what’s happening in between natural gaps in dialogue on DVDs, or TVs, cinemas and also arts performances.

So traditionally it is meant for people who are blind or vision impaired to describe the visuals, and describe those important bits in films or programmes that are lost if you can’t see the visuals. But what’s really interesting about this research is that it actually points to other implications for audio description and benefits that can be useful for a whole range of people, so not just people who are blind and vision impaired.

Roberta: And what other things were the researcher’s observations?

Katie:  So what she noted is that because audio description provides that extra information in that second audio track, it actually helps to reinforce information and improve engagement, and help create a more complete picture for people with autistic related disability.

So typically people on the autistic spectrum will have trouble understanding, say human emotion and engagement, and they may have difficulties, a common difficulty is identifying people and names. So as audio description will include those descriptions of say, people’s moods or temperament so, “The man stormed into the room angrily,” or, “The girl frolicked happily through the garden,” or whatever, Garman found that it actually helped those people who struggled to identify emotions. And as well, because it will often say, the person who, I don’t know, “Roberta frolicked happily through the garden,” say, helps identify those people in the scene which is often a problem.

Roberta: Yeah, well when I first saw the topic Katie for today, and I saw it was about people with autistic disabilities, it makes sense now.

Katie: Yeah.

Roberta: You know what the symptoms of autism are.

Katie:   Yeah, look it’s interesting as well, because we’ve been looking at, as well, how captions, which are traditionally for the deaf and hearing impaired, how they actually help improve comprehension and literacy and things like that for people who aren’t just deaf and hearing impaired, but across, people for example who don’t have English as their second language, to help their uptake and comprehension on films or DVDs or programmes, or whatever.

And our particular campaign, called CAP THAT!, is looking at how teachers can turn on captions. I know it’s different to audio description but it’s that similar idea of having that second stream of information. Yeah, it’s very, very interesting. It helps all sorts of people: people who are struggling to read or those with learning disabilities, and as this research points to, people on the autistic spectrum. So it’s really interesting and I think as more research comes out around this it will definitely help build more of the case for audio description and how it can be used for a whole bunch of different people.

Roberta: Well that’s right, and it has evolved that way, and I’m just so happy that it has because it’s been an amazing journey to use that expression, that from Media Access Australia and all blindness organisations. 

If you want to find out more about audio description in Australia you can visit the Media Access Australia website which is mediaaccess.org.au and you can view a database of audio described DVDs as well as audio described cinema and art schedules. Katie, thank you very much for all that today.

Katie: Thanks so much Roberta, a pleasure.

Roberta:I’ve been speaking with Katie Couani, Marketing Communications Coordinator at Media Access Australia, and that number too I’d like to give you. I like the phone number, because I like to speak to people: 02 9212 6242. And Media Access Australia are supporters of this programme.