Issue 00 — Spring 2025
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Giorgia Di Giusto on poetic audio description as creative practice
We follow Giorgia on a journey that begins with dance and leads to cinema. Through workshops and festival programmes, we explore both visible and invisible barriers, along with strategies for overcoming them. They introduce us to poetic audio description — an emerging practice and accessibility technology rooted in artistic creation, which adds new layers of context and emotional depth to the experience of films and stage performances.
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GALLERY
What is ‘poetic’ audio description? How did this approach come about?
GDG Poetic audio description is not just an accessibility practice; it’s an art form. It was created to make visual content accessible to blind or visually impaired people, while also conveying its emotional complexity.
If you’ve ever watched a film on Netflix, you might have noticed the option through which you can activate the audio description. What you see there is a well-known and widespread technology, “synthetic audio description.” It functionally describes what appears on screen — like a door opening or how many people are in a room.
Poetic audio description offers something more. It was born from the collaboration between Giuseppe Comuniello, a blind performer, and Camilla Guarino, a dancer and playwright. Audio description is an integral part of their daily lives and their relationship. Camilla constantly describes what she sees to Giuseppe. From the intimacy of their conversation, they began to build a new language. A way to describe movement without reducing it to a caption. To feel the why of a gesture, not just what’s happening.
Today, they present this new language as an open artistic tool, sharing it through public workshops. And whilst it is a practice born from accessibility in the context of performing arts, it can speak to everyone. It becomes a new layer of access and interpretation for several types of time-based artworks.
The practice was brought to the public for the first time with a performance they co-authored, Let Me Be (2021). I had the fortune to experience the performance live, with poetic audio description. More than simply receiving information, I was listening to images, metaphors, emotions.
How can poetic audio description also transform the cinematic experience?
GDG Of course, cinema is a different language compared to live performance. Giu-
seppe and Camilla work with dance, where the body takes centre stage and words are almost absent. In that context, poetic audio description works as a narrator’s voice — it can effectively fully replace synthetic description. But cinema already has its own sound structures: there’s dialogue, sound effects, and often a voiceover. Introducing it in this context requires balance.
And yet, even when we listen to a film and follow the dialogue, we often miss the details that draw us into the story. The details that speak through light, movement, rhythm — all elements that synthetic audio description tends to omit or oversimplify. We hear: “A person walks.” But it doesn’t tell us what kind of energy that walk carries. When we watch, we’re not just looking. We’re interpreting. Poetic audio description creates, in a way, a wider pathway of interpretation.
Is there something that has stopped us so far from imagining a form of visual accessibility that is both equitable and creative?
GDG Today, going to the cinema is still very complicated for a blind or visually impaired person. There are many barriers — often invisible ones. And cinemas are not always equipped to address them.
Not all films have an audio description. Sometimes this is not planned at all in the production process; sometimes it is introduced as an afterthought, when the whole budget is already spent.
Even when audio description does exist, access might not be immediate. For example, the Locarno Festival uses an app called Greta. To activate it, you need a compatible smartphone, you need to bring your own headphones, and know how to start the audio track. That process, too, can be a barrier.
Accessibility is a multilayered process. And every layer matters: the language, the technology, the context. It requires thoughtful planning and people willing to engage with its complexity.
The basic principle that must guide such planning is that disability is not a flaw — it’s part of human diversity. And every one of us needs different tools to navigate the world.
In 2024, you led a poetic audio description workshop in Switzerland, developed with Teatro Danzabile and supported by the Locarno Festival. Can you tell us more?
GDG The Festival invited some organisations to propose an activity, and with Teatro Danzabile we decided to bring poetic audio description into schools. We didn’t want it to be seen as something niche or “for a few,” but as a shared, inclusive opportunity.
We needed film material that was short, easy to understand, and practical for the workshop. So we selected a short film — Lo stretto indispensabile (2022), directed by Sergio Visinoni and produced by Lab 80 film.
This short was conceived from the start with accessibility in mind. The funding already covered an audio description track and subtitles for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers. Even though the audio description was synthetic, the fact that it was written during the production process improved its quality — it became part of the film’s creative vision, not just a technical afterthought.
We also chose the film for the importance of its story: it portrays the life of a person with a disability, and the protagonist was actively involved in making it. That, to me, is essential. It reflects the principle of “nothing about us without us” — the idea that people with lived experience should help tell their own stories: they should be active creators, not just passive recipients. This was also a key message we wanted to convey during the workshop.
It was a great success with the children, so we’re now working on adapting it for adults. I’m excited about the prospect of further experimenting with live poetic audio description during festivals. The audiences there are open and reflective. I’d love to organise screenings where they listen to the interpreter’s voice through headphones, in real time, and experience the film together with this new, narrating companion.
Can poetic audio description influence other technologies for accessibility, such as subtitles?
GDG Subtitles are definitely part of the same conversation. Too often, like with audio description, we think of them as something neutral or purely technical. But subtitles can also bring aesthetic value. They can tell a story, and carry artistic weight.
Today, unfortunately, there’s a tendency to oversimplify them. Sometimes they’re written in a rush. Onscreen, they often lack definition, blend into light backgrounds, or, more generally, ignore basic readability rules.
There are some great examples, especially in content designed for deaf audiences, where subtitles use different colours to distinguish between voices. However basic that may seem, it adds creativity to the essential function.
SDH (Subtitles for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing) also include key sound elements that are essential for deaf audiences. But they don’t only serve people who can’t hear. They may help viewers who aren’t fluent in the film’s language. People with cognitive challenges. Neurodivergent audiences. Older adults. So many people, in different ways, may benefit from having text to help follow a story whilst watching a film.
So why not include subtitles by default in every screening? Why keep treating them as an annoying afterthought, instead of an integral part of the work? Maybe we fear they’ll “interfere” with the visual experience of hearing audiences. But what does “interfere” really mean? Who gets to decide what is disruptive?
We’re becoming increasingly used to subtitles in foreign-language films. So why not also explore their aesthetic possibilities, their narrative power? If audio description uses words to evoke what we see, then subtitles can also go beyond the mere transcription of the dialogues. There’s still so much creative ground to explore here.
How do you see accessibility evolving in the world of cinema, especially with the rise of artificial intelligence?
GDG Many big productions today have the resources to make their films accessible. Production schedules, however, are tight, and films often reach festivals at the last minute, with no room left to incorporate audio descriptions or accessible subtitles.
True accessibility takes time. That’s one of the first things we learn in training and that we try to convey through our workshops.
Across Europe, Creative Europe is beginning to reward projects that prioritize accessibility from the outset. The Italian Ministry of Culture is now exploring how to embed accessibility from the early stages of audiovisual development. These are encouraging signs. Because it’s not just festivals that need to reflect on this — production companies also have to ask themselves: is access going to be treated as a right, or as an exception?
Artificial intelligence can help — but it can’t replace us. For instance, AI-generated audio descriptions can be a useful starting point, a kind of ‘draft’. But when you layer in the emotion of a human voice, you get something richer. The two approaches shouldn’t be exclusive — they can complement each other.
The same goes for subtitles. For many deaf people, written language isn’t their first language — sign language is. So true accessibility would mean having a sign language interpreter available for every audiovisual work.
What I’ve come to understand over the years is that there are no shortcuts. Accessibility is something we build piece by piece, each time, by carefully combining technology with a human touch.
And when we get it right, the result isn’t just functional — it’s meaningful. It’s something beautiful and shared.