Event boundary perception in audio described films by people without sight

Abstract

Audio description (AD) plays a crucial role in making audiovisual media accessible to people with a visual impairment, enhancing their experience and understanding. This study employs an event segmentation task to examine how people without sight perceive and segment narrative events in films with AD, compared to sighted viewers without AD. Two AD versions were utilized, differing in the explicitness of conveyed event boundaries. Results reveal that the participants without sight generally perceived event boundaries similarly to their sighted peers, affirming AD's effectiveness in conveying event structures. However, when key event boundaries were more implicitly expressed, event boundary recognition diminished. Collectively, these findings offer valuable insights into event segmentation processes across sensory modalities. Additionally, they underscore the significance of how AD presents event boundaries, influencing the perception and interpretation of audiovisual media for people with a visual impairment and providing applied insights into event segmentation, multimodal processing, and audiovisual accessibility.