The Portugal Telecom Foundation, a public service institution with a primary focus on the Health, Education and Access to Communications areas, is now associated with the postdoctoral project of Rita Oliveira, researcher at the Digimedia Unit . The project aims to promote the access to TV contents with audio description by visually impaired users, suggesting an innovative approach to the traditional way of creating audio description for Television, based on volunteering and collaboration between viewers.

Rita Oliveira’s postdoctoral project, supervised by Professors Jorge Ferraz de Abreu and Ana Margarida Almeida of the Department of Communication and Arts, it is intended, on the one hand, to make the audio description offer more widely available through the development of a cross-platform application for the creation of individual or collaborative contributions by volunteers and, on the other hand, to change the way audio description is accessed by viewers with visual impairment through the development of an Interactive Television (iTV) application accessible to this public.
The research project lasts 36 months and it is expected to end in March 2019, being funded by the FCT national funding agency, under the grant number SFRH/BPD/ 112129/2015. In addition to the partnership with the PT Foundation, the project also has the support of the AlticeLabs@UA laboratory (under an academic project) and with some ACAPO delegations.
The new partnership with the PT Foundation will allow moving forward with more strength to data collection with a broad sample of visually impaired viewers.

University of Aveiro – Department of Communication and Arts – DigiMedia Research Unit