Painting with Words: Audio Describing a Comic Book

Abstract

This thesis is a case study, a combination of evaluative and descriptive analysis. In short, this paper tries prove correct the hypothesis that it is possible to render comic books accessible to the blind and visually impaired (BVI) without the artwork losing too many of the essential elements that convey the story and comprise the art in ‘sequential art,’ as comic books are also known. In addition to proving the hypothesis correct, the aim of the study was to find out initial details about what needs to be considered when transcreating a multimodal source text into a monomodal target text. The chosen approach was that of ekphrasis, poetic description. This strategy was selected to allow more room for creativity and interpretation when writing the audio description.