Text-to-speech vs. human voiced audio descriptions

This article presents an experiment that aims to determine whether blind and visually impaired people would accept the implementation of text-to-speech in the audio description of dubbed feature films in the Catalan context. A user study was conducted with 67 blind and partially sighted people who a...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Fernández Torné, Ana|||0000-0002-0132-5945, Matamala, Anna|||0000-0002-1607-9011
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2015
País:España
Institución:Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Repositorio:Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:ddd.uab.cat:142579
Acceso en línea:https://ddd.uab.cat/record/142579
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Accessibility
Audio description
Audiovisual translation
Text-to-speech
Speech synthesis
Catalan language
Blind
Visually impaired
Descripción
Sumario:This article presents an experiment that aims to determine whether blind and visually impaired people would accept the implementation of text-to-speech in the audio description of dubbed feature films in the Catalan context. A user study was conducted with 67 blind and partially sighted people who assessed two synthetic voices when applied to audio description, as compared to two natural voices. All of the voices had been previously selected in a preliminary test. The analysis of the data (both quantitative and qualitative) concludes that most participants accept Catalan text-to-speech audio description as an alternative solution to the standard human-voiced audio description. However, natural voices obtain statistically higher scores than synthetic voices and are still the preferred solution.