Enriching Audio Description of Film by Using the Novel the Case of The Hours

Audio description (AD) of films is a way of making films accessible for blind audiences by inserting a description of relevant visual elements into dialogue gaps in the original soundtrack. Most AD guidelines support the “what you see is what you say” principle, thus, they limit the many possibilities of reflecting the rich multiple layers of meaning contained in films. In an attempt to go beyond this limitation, this research proposes that in the cases of films adapted from a novel, the novel is used as a source for writing the film’s AD. At the crossroads between audiovisual translation studies and literary studies, the research is organized around two key phases: the first is a production of an AD for an excerpt from The Hours, directed by Stephen Daldry, by using the novel from which the film is adapted; and the second is a comparative analysis between this new AD and the AD supplied with the commercial DVD. Following five steps in the production phase, the novel could be used for AD scripting, however, the AD could hardly rest upon the novel alone and a complementary description had to be written by the describer. The contrastive analysis of the two ADs, based on characterization and subjectivity markers, shows that two effects are exclusive of AD using the novel: (1) granting the blind audience access to the characters’ minds by incorporating the omniscient narrator’s knowledge from the novel, and (2) rendering a degree of subjectivity in AD by reverting to the author’s words. Challenging one of the maxims of AD, this thesis is a modest, but a convincing step towards pushing the limits of AD for an enriched film experience for the blind.