Three different receptions of the same film

Audio description is nowadays increasingly popular. This is due to the rising social awareness of media accessibility along with the many European Union directives which make national broadcasters responsible for providing audiovisual programmes whose content has to be accessible to all. To date, little scientific research has been undertaken in this area, while two important facts are now a reality: the definition of guidelines and national standards, and the increasing practice of translation for audio description. These two trends call for scientific studies which, in turn, should provide data to be used in view of a possible harmonization of audio description standards throughout Europe. The idea of working towards a European common accessibility resource centre will mean a step forward towards ‘Media for All’2 <www.transmediaresearchgroup.com>. to follow the EU directive ‘TV without Frontiers’. This article is the result of an empirical study investigating one of the many thorny issues in audio description: the reception of a film narrative by a given culture (Spanish), along with contrastive analyses with two other different cultures (US and Greek). The results which the article yields put into question the current bibliography on audio description, which has so far overlooked issues of perception across different cultures.