I had a conference presentation jointly with Iwona Mazur at the International Bilingual Conference: Audiovisual Translation - Multidisciplinary Approaches in Montpellier, France. Our presentation was entitled: “Overcoming Barriers – The Pioneering Years of Audio Description in Poland”. Here’s the abstract:

The first attempts to introduce audio description in Poland were made by the members of the blind and visually impaired community themselves. The first audio described version of a film was only created in 2006. So far, only nine films and two TV series have been made accessible to the blind. Although the number of blind Poles exceeds 500 thousand, audiodescription is still in its nascence in Poland and therefore no professional standards have been set for this type of audiovisual translation.
In the paper we will describe the first bottom-up efforts initiated by the blind and visually impaired to promote audio description in Poland. We will analyse selected examples of audio described audiovisual material in order to identify the most common mistakes that render amateur audio description unacceptable. An interdisciplinary approach (combining translation studies, film studies and studies of perception in the blind) will be used to classify the mistakes and to offer better solutions which, on the hand, are adjusted to the characteristics of the Polish language, and on the other, meet the expectations of a given target audience depending on their sex or age.
Finally, AD-Verba, a three-year interdisciplinary project aimed at the professionalization of audio description in Poland, which is planned to be carried out at Adam Mickiewicz University will be described. The expected deliverables of AD-Verba include professional audio description standards for Polish as well as survey studies carried out among blind and visually impaired audiences. In this context, the necessity for national and language-specific audio description standards will be discussed.