The MADAT research group has been formed as the development of a national-financed research group, named ACT. The MADAT research group is currently exploring multimodal accessibility to texts by identifying viable solutions to issues faced by social and affinity groups, as they access audiovisual digital texts. These issues include problems of access for the blind, the partially-sighted, the deaf and the partially deaf as well as intercultural, intertextual and pragmatic issues difficulties of children and young adults in the accessing multimodal digital contents in English as an Additional Language. We are developing models for the accurate mapping of physical, cultural, social and pragmatic barriers that may hinder or halt effective communication and access to a wide variety of texts in English as an Additional Language. The research group uses both quantitative and qualitative analyses, comparing fine-grained socio-semiotic analyses and corpus-based and corpus-driven analysis with the aim of combining these approaches for a full understanding of how barriers can be successfully removed. With the support of relevant institutions, such as audiovisual companies and other stakeholders in digital media scenarios, we research audiovisual text analysis and translation of multimodal digital textualities by focusing on in-built media affordances with the ultimate aim of expanding patterns of awareness and understanding to wider social and cultural communities that may encounter several issues in accessing these different forms of textualities.
date/time interval:
(October 17, 2009 - )