Social Entrepreneur Series – Fostering inclusion by audio description [Community Participation]

Social Entrepreneur – Dawning Leung

 

“The true meaning of equality and inclusion is not to arrange a dedicated session for the visually impaired, but to make it possible for them to take part in the same activity with their sighted counterparts.”

Dr Dawning Leung, the founder of Audio Description Association (Hong Kong) (AuDeAHK), believes that persons with visual impairment should enjoy the equal rights to “watch” movies, to “view” exhibitions as well as to join various cultural and outdoor activities. To study audio description, Dawning left for the United Kingdom to acquire a relevant Doctorate degree. In 2015, she founded AuDeAHK to promote audio description and to train audio describers in the Chinese societies.

What is audio description? According to Dawning, it is a school of professional translation technique of transferring visual elements into verbal descriptions. In film audio description, for instance, audio describers will depict the scene settings and the characters’ moves, facial expressions, outfits etc. in between dialogues and sound effects. The visually impaired may hence comprehend the plot by hearing rather than by watching.

Audio description benefits not only persons with visual difficulties. Everyone can obtain supplementing information from the translated visual contents. For example, children with special educational needs may understand the emotions of characters through audio description. “I recalled a lady wearing a pair of reading glasses who followed our audio described tour in a museum. Towards the end of the tour, she took off the glasses and said, ‘I’d rather listen to your narratives!’”

 

Innovative Venture – Film Audio Description Services, Audio Description Services for Outdoor Activities, Audio Description Services for Museums

The innovative venture mentioned above is funded by the Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship Development Fund and assisted and supported by the Fund’s intermediaries in project implementation.  The details of the innovative venture are as follows:

 

Name of Organisation: Audio Description Association (Hong Kong) Limited

Service nature: Community Participation

Beneficiary group: Persons with disabilities

Project type:  Prototype

Intermediary Programme: Impact Incubator , Good Seed

 

---

What is Social Entrepreneur Series?

Stories of how other social entrepreneurs aspired to start their own business might facilitate your social innovation and entrepreneurship exploration.

A series of social entrepreneur stories will be featured and categorised into six sub-series: Education and Learning, Job Training and Opportunities, Community Participation, Healthcare, Food and Transport.  What you are going to read are stories of social entrepreneurs taking forward the startup projects that help themselves and others.