When East Meets West: A Comparison of Audio Description Guidelines in China and Europe

Abstract

Despite China being the country with most disabled people in the world, the provision of media accessibility services and their academic study are still at a crawling stage. The present study departed from two objectives: to present a sample of three Chinese AD guidelines that mainly serve for training purposes, and to compare the Chinese situation in terms of guidelines to that of Europe, to see if there are any relevant differences to point out and any mutual lessons to be learnt. Our results show there are a lot of general similarities between the different Chinese and European guidelines and that the main difference is the different approach to objective vs. subjective description.