Diversity in museums: The inclusive value of museum audio description.

This contribution seeks to explore the potential of museum audio description (AD) – a sub-genre of general screen AD – as an instance of intersemiotic translation for non-sighted and sighted alike by drawing on a systematic review of museum AD guidelines and on extensive bibliography from Museum Studies (MS), Translation Studies (TS) and, within the latter, Audiovisual Translation (AVT) and Media Accessibility (MA). The paper will first discuss the social mission of museums and the intrinsic diversity characterising their communication and translation practices, with a special focus on museum AD. It will then move on to the wider value of screen AD; although the latter is primarily intended as an access tool to help blind and visually impaired individuals construct a mental image of what they cannot partially or totally see, its recognised benefits for other groups (Perego 2017) will be addressed. Similarly, the paper will discuss the potential of museum AD for a wider audience by presenting insights from museum-specific AD guidelines. Museum AD may arguably be revisited as a form of museum translation for everybody, which could truly foster social inclusion.