Visually impaired persons enjoy films or documentaries as much as everyone else, but in order to fully understand them they need audio description and audio subtitling for what is shown on the screen.
Audio description communicates important visual content with spoken information inserted as a narrative between the dialogue and other programme sounds. Audio subtitling – also known as spoken subtitles – is the reading aloud of subtitles. As a complement – never as a substitute – to audio description, audio subtitling is especially useful to the visually impaired community in the case of foreign-language products that are subtitled rather than dubbed.
We believe that public funding and in particular MEDIA funding to the film industry should be granted only to projects that will create a version with audio description and audio subtitling. But as an intermediate realistic step, we ask that, for the period 2021-2027 the Creative Europe Programme and annual work programmes include audio description and audio subtitling among the selection and award criteria for MEDIA funding, and at least 25% of films that receive MEDIA production or distribution funding have an audio description and audio subtitling in the languages of the production.