Paintings to my ears: A method of studying subjectivity in audio description for art museums

An increasing number of museums are using audio description (AD) to provide access for visually impaired visitors to their collections by means of a wide range of mobile devices and apps. However, research in this field is still limited. The present article proposes a methodological approach that combines interviews and corpus analysis for studying audio-descriptive guides of art museums. More specifically, the proposed methodology focuses on the study of subjectivity, which has become a controversial aspect of AD in the past few years and the focus of a number of studies. The article offers a step-by-step description of the methodology and illustrates it with data from a study carried out by the authors on this type of multimodal communication.