Agnieszka Szarkowska – FRED Accessible Cinema

PODCAST | Francesca Raffi interviews Agnieszka Szarkowska, for FRED’s new periodical programme on media accessibility.

FRED is pleased to present a new periodical programme on media accessibility and inclusion, fostered by Sub-ti Access. This programme aims to inform its listeners and keep them updated on the status of media accessibility. We hope to raise awareness on accessibility in media and live entertainment, which is one of the 8 priority areas of the European Disability Strategy 2010 – 2020.

Agnieszka Szarkowska is currently Research Fellow at the Centre for Translation Studies, University College London (2016-2018). She is now working on the SURE project: Exploring Subtitle Reading Process with Eye Tracking Technology. Since 2007, she has also been Assistant Professor in the Institute of Applied Linguistics, University of Warsaw. She is the founder and head of the Audiovisual Translation Lab (AVT Lab) and specializes in audiovisual translation, especially subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing and audio description. She is a member of European Association for Studies in Screen Translation (ESIST), European Society for Translation Studies (EST) and an honorary member of the Polish Audiovisual Translators Association (STAW). In the interview, Dr Szarkowska describes the current situation of media accessibility at both national and international level, both in academic and non-academic contexts. She also presents some interesting results stemming from one of her latest projects, Exploring Subtitle Reading with Eye Tracking Technology (SURE), which received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. The study was conducted at the Centre for Translation Studies in cooperation with Deafness Cognition and Language Centre at University College London in spring 2017. The goal of the project was to experimentally study the subtitle reading process in terms of optimum subtitle presentation times (reading speed) and line breaks (segmentation).