Pesquisas sobre a audiodescrição no Brasil: o que os números (não) descrevem?

Abstract

Audio description (AD) is one of the modes of Accessible Audiovisual Translation that translates images into words, that is, from visual to verbal medium. Images in motion, such as audiovisual productions, or static images, such as photographs and paintings, can be audio described. Barbosa (2020) showed that, between 2009 and 2018, there was a growing interest by Brazilian graduates in defending their Master’s theses and PhD dissertations on the topic of AD. Thus, this PhD dissertation aims at understanding the development of graduate works on AD, at Master's and PhD levels, in Brazil. To this end, we developed a descriptive methodology research that, based on bibliometric and scientometric techniques, estimates and evaluates the impact of theses and dissertations on AD for Translation Studies and, more specifically, for Accessible Audiovisual Translation studies. We analyzed a corpus of 112 theses and dissertations published in the Capes’ Theses and Dissertations Catalog database. In total, 70 academic master's theses, 14 professional master's theses, and 28 PhD dissertations deal with 18 different themes involving AD. We analyzed the content of the category “AD in education”, because it is the most representative in the corpus, with 37 works (33%), and identified that most of the defended works deal with AD in the classroom and in didactic materials. These studies sought to contribute to the accessibility of people with visual impairment by conducting empirical research involving the social environment to which they belong to and seeking to contribute to the teaching-learning process.