D2.3 Interim Report on Pilot Services - the School of Engineering ...

preferred the bottom and mixed positions shown on Catalan and Spanish channelsrespectively while British viewers chose only the bottom position.Habits and convention may also explain why colours were favoured as first choice forspeaker identification in Spain, whereas the results in the UK present a different andmore complex landscape. Yet, some interesting implications are emerging here. Forinstance, the deaf, not only in the UK but also in the Spanish tests, seem to likedisplacement and colours, but not tags. In contrast, the hard-of-hearing clearly prefer tagsand reject displacement. This may be due to the age factor. The deaf viewers taking partin the tests were aged between 22 and 45 years old and were used to reading colours andchasing information on a screen, whether on TV or on a computer screen. The hard-ofhearingare generally older and less used to doing this. For them, tags pose fewerproblems for speaker identification. Needless to say, both groups are potentially withinthe subtitling audience, which illustrates the difficulty of finding a standardised form ofSDH that can please all of its users.Finally, a further comment is in order with regard to the importance of conventions in thetests. In the Spanish tests on position and identification, the participants’ views regardingspecific issues do not seem to correspond to their views on overall preference. In otherwords, whereas they identify a given method as the best position or the best way toidentify speakers, they then choose another one, usually the one applied in their country,as their preferred position or identification method. It would appear that they objectivelyadmit the validity of a given method but end up choosing what is conventional in theircountry. This mismatch has also been found in recent experiments with eye-trackingtechnology (Tuominen, 2008), where the viewers’ preferences do not correspond to whathas been identified as objectively better by the eye-tracker. In these cases, and given theabove-mentioned importance given to empirical research, should broadcasters andservice providers go with the eye-tracking evidence and against the viewers’ statedpreferences? Would this not be a form of enlightened despotism, where all is done for theviewers, but nothing by the viewers? Would it be better instead to disregard the empiricalevidence and go with the viewers’ stated preferences, given that they are the consumers?Although it is still early to answer any of these questions, it seems advisable to look for ahappy medium between considering that the consumer is always right and regarding theeye-tracker as the be-all and end-all of the research. The approach adopted in theDTV4All project is to regard viewers’ preferences and empirical research ascomplementary. The initial steps towards the optimisation of SDH in digital TV on thisbasis have been outlined.In audio description further analysis, such as that carried out by corpus linguistics, andresulting data gathered through the experiment is expected to be studied throughdifferent methodological approaches such as eye-tracking. The outcome will show somepossible universals, or laws, or regularities in the reception of visual input. This wouldhave implications for the formulation of harmonised guidelines for AD scriptwritingacross Europe, and the possibility of the translation of a source audio-description text. Itmay, on the other hand, show that while from a top down perspective it was thought thatthere existed a uniform society and culture, we Europeans are still different and perhapsneed more time before we go in search of common cultural behaviour.Page 30