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What inclusion has taught me: A life-changing story (Chapter 9)

9: THE ACCESSIBILITY REPORT

What exactly is this Accessibility Report?

Image 60: Fernando Villamanta, Whatscine’s CEO, reading the Accessibility Report.

An Accessibility Report is a memo that includes all the information that accessibility companies may need in order to create the project’s audio description and subtitles for the Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing (SDH).

It contains different texts written by the film’s creative team: Director, producer, cinematographer, art director, costume designer, sound designer and music composer. Each one of them briefly shares the information necessary to properly represent their artistic work in the audio description and in the SDH.

There is also a film’s technical aspects sheet and a glossary section. With these, we make sure that the accessibility professionals use the same lexicon as the film’s creators. This establishes a much better dialogue between creators and the companies, saving a lot of time and improving the quality of work.

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What inclusion has taught me: A life-changing story (Chapter 8)

8: NIHIL DE NOBIS, SINE NOBIS

“Nothing about us, without us”. This Latin slogan is very relevant in the Civil Rights Movements across the world.

We decided to fully embrace this statement and here is how: As stated before, many of the abovementioned innovations and ideas were made possible thanks to the conversations we had with the impaired people who collaborated with us.

Who are they and in what departments did they help?

-VICENTE-

He was a marketing specialist before losing his sight. He led the marketing department of Blues Time.

Image 51: Vicente during Blues Time’s shooting at Loco Club Concert Hall. By Miguel Serrano.

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What inclusion has taught me: A life-changing story (Chapter 7)

7: WHAT IF INCLUSION IMPROVED ART?

The idea of Blues Time came to me in February 2017.

My grandfather was suffering from severe dementia and living with him was emotionally challenging.

I wrote the first draft of the film, but all my energy was focused on XMILE at that time, so I filed it away and moved on for some months. But, after the talk at the Senate, in summer 2017, I was ready to blow off the dust from Blues Time’s draft.

The main reason was not only to share my personal experience about my grandfather’s; I wanted to test the new ways of improving audio-visual accessibility that I had actively been promoting for almost half a year. I needed to be sure that what we had fought for was worth the blood, sweat and tears.

Image 39: Blues Time’s main character Fa and her pocket watch. By Miguel Serrano.

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What inclusion has taught me: A life-changing story (Chapter 6)

6: COLLATERAL CONSEQUENCES

During 2016 and 2017, we also achieved other goals worth mentioning:

-1-

Cardinal Herrera CEU University undertook research about the use of the five senses in XMILE. Over 200 people were invited to participate as members of the audience in the research screenings, which had been adapted for accessibility.

Image 32: Audience members taking part in the research after watching XMILE.

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What inclusion has taught me: A life-changing story (Chapter 5)

5: POLITICS AND THE FIRST BIG CHANGE

Parallel to the investigation and screenings that we planned across the first half of 2017, we included some interactive experiences in Spanish Sign Language. The XMILE experience was so unique that we received a lot of media attention. I will explain those interactive experiences in the following chapter.

As a consequence, in June of 2017, politicians sat up, took notice of our project, and called me to give a talk at the Spanish Senate.

Image 29: The Spanish Senate.

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