By Tara Waternaux, Mathilde Ribon and Cédric Deplanque, Master 1 TA2M (Multimedia Translation and Accessibility), Université Bourgogne Europe. Translated from French by them and revised by Will Noonan.
Cédric explaining SDH subtitles
Those interested in audiovisual translation should also take an interest in accessibility for audiences with specific needs, especially people with hearing, visual and cognitive impairments. Although audio description and closed captions have become standard on major TV channels, they are only sporadically available in most movie theatres.
Since 11.7 million people in France were identified in 2023 as having a sensory disability, the question of how to rectify the general public’s relative ignorance about audiovisual accessibility appears even more pressing.
Six students from Université Bourgogne Europe (Dijon, France) - Tara Waternaux, Mathilde Ribon and Cédric Deplanque from Master TA2M (Multimedia Translation and Accessibility), along with Daniela Moreno López, Théo Protche and Laurie Le Roux from Master T2M (Multimedia Translation) – worked on this very question during an internship with the municipal cinema theatre, L’Empire, in the small town of Auxonne in the context of the festival called 'Quand la Bourgogne invite la Franche-Comté' in March 2025.
Our original mission involved organizing workshops aimed at adults attending the festival to raise awareness of closed captions and audio description. However, it quickly became clear these workshops could also be of interest to another audience and could even encourage future vocations. That is why our team also came to organize translation and audiovisual accessibility workshops aimed at 10 and 14-year-old schoolchildren from local elementary and middle schools.
To each their own workshop
Before the festival, for our first classroom experience, we asked one half of the class to watch chosen video extracts with their ears covered. The other half had to try explaining the sequence to their classmates by writing the dialogues and sounds that should be made explicit and assigning them the right colour according to the specific French norm for closed captions. For another video extract, we asked half of the class to describe the scene orally to their classmates who had to close their eyes during the screening.
Middle-schoolers learning to use a subtitle editor
As for the workshops planned during the festival, we were lucky to be able to work with two short films placed at our disposal by the Monts Jura film library, 'Le diable dans le beffroi' (1985), by Jean-Marie Fawer, and 'Île Flottante' (1988), by Pascale Thirode and Olivier Crespin.
'Le diable dans le beffroi' is a stop-motion animated movie with characters made of modelling clay, which matched perfectly with a school audience. Its characters, whose mouths are not animated, alternate between intelligible French and a French-sounding made-up language. With these elements in mind, how to identify which character is talking and which colour is appropriate to caption dialogues and sounds? Which captioning strategy should be adopted with dialogues spoken in a made-up language? As for audio description, which details should feature, and how to insert descriptions in the given format, with the film's constant mumbling and rare silence gaps? Since the narration relies essentially on visual cues but has important sound elements, this movie was a perfect case study without being too complex for the classes to analyse.
As for the adults, we opted for a participatory workshop about audio description using the short film “Île flottante”. Its absurd comedy screenplay, sprinkled with surreal chains of events, led us to adopt the same humorous tone for the audio description exercise. Along the way, we realized the exercise may have been too complex for the first time of an audience whose expectation was to discover the basics and key features of audiovisual accessibility. Nonetheless, it brings interesting questions about the reading of this movie and the way to condense what should be [audio]described. As with translation, audio description is a real job only learned through practice!
Tara explaining a subtitle editor
Afterwards
Feedback from the schools was very positive: schoolchildren displayed great enthusiasm during workshops and were eager to receive the compiled version of their achievements. Their teachers were equally satisfied with the experience, and we hope it will be possible to repeat it with new classes and through the festival’s next editions in the future. We also learned lessons from this first experience with a school audience. For example, the time between two meetings with the classes was a little too long for pupils to remember everything and the workshops often took more time than we had planned. Good organization is required when collaborating with schools, and the fact that accessibility directives have been strengthened within the European Union leads us to hope accessibility awareness workshops towards young audiences such as the one we did will become a part of the curriculum. We think MA students in translation have a key role to play here.
Adults were fewer than expected for their workshops, which corroborated our observation that the importance of accessibility for society at large is still a new idea to most people and that those directly concerned often do not think of it at all. This gave us pause on how to better reach and raise this audience’s awareness. The fact is that television and radio are still the main ways to stay informed for the adult population, more than social networks sometimes. We also wonder if participative workshops are really the best way to reach this audience, compared to young audiences that were more receptive to this format.
However, the audience that came during the festival to watch a movie screened with closed captions stayed for the exchange time that followed. Our first question for the attendees was: 'Did the closed captions bother you during your viewing?' The answer was unanimous 'No'. This could provide a powerful argument to convince movie theatres that are still reluctant to program this kind of accessible screening. One of our contacts who identifies as capital-D Deaf - the only deaf or hard of hearing person present for this exchange time – shared his own experience and commented on the closed captions of the movie, without which it wouldn’t have been possible for him to understand the film completely. We are very grateful to him for his valuable contribution, even more since it is essential to involve people with disabilities when designing contents, tools, technologies or events talking about their disabilities. We would have liked to be able to do the same thing for schoolchildren’s workshops and give our attendees the possibility to contextualize the necessity of what they learned. We now hope we will have the chance to do it the next editions of a collaboration we wish long-lasting.
The workshops and talks we facilitated were a first time for us. It was a very enriching experience. After our intervention, the Auxonne movie theatre agreed on the need to include more accessible screenings in their program. We were asked to produce training material for its team that would allow to inform the audience about audio description and closed captions before each accessible screening. We have also been given the opportunity to extend our work in the form of a debate on dubbing versus subtitles during their thematic week focused on original language version. We can say our mission was a success given the enthusiasm of the teachers and pupils we met through our workshops.
We must not forget everything was possible thanks to the good will of Auxonne’s movie theatre which had not any legal obligation to dedicate a part to audiovisual accessibility in its events. It highlights the fact that the French law of the 11th of January 2005 and all its additions remain quite vague about the obligations of movie theatres regarding accessibility. But in order to put an end to discriminations and prejudices against people living with disabilities, it is necessary to ensure they can enjoy the same spaces and audiovisual contents as anyone. Giving them the opportunity to be in the same space to watch and discuss the movie together would normalize the perception of disability beyond a mere limitation of their capacity.
This is why we think the European Union and French government should continue to legislate on that matter, so that we keep going forward with research and development about information and audiovisual accessibility. Our team believes that proficiency in multimedia accessibility is part of the added value of human translation, and we hope the EMT network will keep endorsing this evolution.
References
Crespin, O. & Thirode, P. (Directors). (1988). Île Flottante [Film]. Monts Jura film library.
Fawer, J.-M. (Director). (1985). Le diable dans le beffroi [Film]. Monts Jura film library.
Jardillier, S. (2023). Accessibilité et cinéma. Les études du CNC. https://www.cnc.fr/professionnels/etudes-et-rapports/etudes-prospectives/accessibilite-et-cinema_1925107
Mon Parcours Handicap. (2025). Handicap et cinéma : films, salles et événements accessibles. Mon Parcours Handicap. https://www.monparcourshandicap.gouv.fr/actualite/handicap-et-cinema-films-salles-et-evenements-accessibles
Details
Languages: English, French
Publication date: 7 April 2026
EMT Category: Translation competences