Exploring the accessibility creative continuum on streaming platforms: A contrastive multimodal analysis of subjectivity and objectivity in audio description

Abstract

The suitability of objective or subjective audio description (AD) is still an ongoing topic with opposite views. While AD guidelines used by some countries and streaming platforms support the traditional perspective of providing an objective or denotational description, growing interest has developed among researchers towards a more narrative, subjective, or interpretative description. In this paper, we explore whether the AD provided by different streaming platforms can be located at the same point along an accessibility creative continuum in terms of objectivity and subjectivity. To fulfil our aim, a multimodal analysis based on audiovisual texts’ meaning codes was used to operationalize how objectivity and subjectivity interact in a corpus of AD in English from Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, and Apple TV+. Our results show, firstly, that both objectivity and subjectivity appear in the AD excerpts from every platform. Secondly, our findings point to dissimilarities when comparing the frequency of objective and subjective elements that interact in each platform’s AD. More specifically, whereas Apple TV+ seems to be closer to the objectivity end of the creative continuum, Disney+ can be located near the subjectivity end, with both Amazon Prime Video and Netflix being roughly in the middle. In conclusion, if we consider pure objectivity and subjectivity in AD as two opposite poles of a continuum, the AD provided by these streaming platforms displays different degrees of creativity.