Page 20 - e-Expert Seminar Series: Translation and Laguage Teaching. Media Accessibility in Modern Languages and Translation

he is currently coordinator of the Media Accessibility Platform, and he is a member of the Advisory Board of the European project “Interlingual Live Subtitling for Access”.
ABSTRACT: As of now, dominant approaches in Media Accessibility (MA) education and practice are, by and large, prescriptive. In this paper, I discuss how these prescriptive approaches are influenced by, and subsequently reinforce, several discriminatory normative frameworks, such as the medical model of disability. I therefore suggest a (re)design of MA education and practices using the tools that constitute the critical apparatus of Accessibility Studies, such as the human variation paradigm, the social model of accessibility, the universalist account of access, and the poietic model of agency, as well as proactive and user-centred approaches. More specifically, I highlight the necessity for moving from prescriptive approaches to what I refer to as a “poietically driven approach”. This is an approach to MA training and practice that is diversity-based, user-led, proactive-oriented, and quality-centred. An approach based on a new model of agency, where users are not merely passive recipients but also co-creators of meaning, and where each agent—makers, experts, and users—plays an (inter)active role in
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