OPEN conducts extensive research on accessibility in the media and cultural sector.
Our research focus:
The experiences of users and makers.
We explore the perspectives of users, facilitators and creators to understand their unique experiences.
Products and services.
We study, design and test media accessibility products and services.
Processes and technologies.
We analyze and develop processes and technologies for media accessibility.
We focus on interdisciplinary and participatory research, in collaboration with other research groups and social actors. Our empirical research methods include both quantitative and qualitative approaches.
This webpage is currently under construction and will soon list all our research projects. In the meantime, our main research projects can be found below and on the website of our research group TricS.
Meet our researchers
Nina Reviers:
Media accessibility is at the heart of Nina Reviers’ work, focusing on how film, TV, museums and dance can be experienced by people with different sensory and cognitive needs. A first strand of her work improves subtitles and audio description by studying how new technologies (like AI translation tools) affect the way professionals work and how this, in turn, shapes viewers’ understanding and enjoyment.
A second strand focuses on accessible art experiences: in museum projects she studies how tactile objects and alternative guides can support visitors who are blind or who process information differently in building a personal connection with artworks, while dance projects explore how movement can be “translated” into words without losing the performance’s emotional impact. Across these projects, she treats accessibility as a creative, collaborative process, working closely with disabled audiences, artists and institutions so that access solutions are co-designed rather than simply added on at the end.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nina-reviers-9490a415/
Isabelle Robert:
My research interests are translation, revision and post-editing processes, multimodal simultaneous interpreting and live subtitling (https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/staff/isabelle-robert/research/ )
Jarno Wuyts:
Optimising audio description: how speech tempo affects listening
Audio Description helps people who are blind or have low vision enjoy films, TV, and theatre. It does this by turning the important visual parts (such as actions, gestures, and facial expressions) into spoken words. But one big question remains: how fast should this narration be? If it is too fast, it becomes difficult to follow. If it is too slow, it can interrupt the story. Surprisingly, we still do not know what the “right” speed is, especially for Dutch.
This project studies how the speech tempo in AD affects how much mental effort it takes for listeners to process the description. To do this, it brings together ideas from several fields, including media studies, language sciences, and psychology. The aim of this project is to create a clear and reliable way to measure and test speech tempo for Dutch AD.
By understanding AD speech tempo better, this research hopes to make AD easier to follow and more enjoyable. This will help make films, series and theatre more accessible for people with visual impairments, and improve the experience for everyone.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jarno-w/
Kim Steyaert:
As the demand for accessible media is rapidly increasing, the obstacles for meeting this demand on a large scale are becoming more apparent. In the case of audio description (AD), one of these obstacles is the lack of trained language professionals who can create or translate ADs for audiovisual media.
This research explores how neural machine translation (NMT) can be leveraged to translate English AD scripts into Dutch, while accounting for the specific linguistic features of AD and its inherently multimodal nature. To investigate the potential and limitations of NMT for AD translation, the study combines an in-depth corpus analysis with an experimental component involving translation and post-editing tasks with professional audio describers. The findings aim to provide insights into the effectiveness of NMT in this context and to contribute to the broader discussion on how technology can support the creation of more accessible media.
#media accessibility #audio description #machine translation #language technology #artificial intelligence