The use of virtual reality (VR) technologies and, in particular, of VR360 content can provide great benefits in the society. This particularly applies to the culture and heritage sectors, where venues, goods and events can be digitalised to provide hyper-realistic and engaging experiences, anywhere and anytime. Despite significant advances in the field of VR, there is still an unexplored aspect which is crucial for every service and experience where user interaction is expected: accessibility. This article firstly reviews the needs, challenges and limitations for making VR360 experiences accessible. Based on these facts, an end-to-end platform to efficiently integrate accessibility services within VR360 content is presented. The platform encompasses all steps from media authoring to media consumption, but special attention is given to the accessibility-enabled VR360 player, as it is the end user interaction interface. The presentation modes for the supported access services (like subtitling, audio description and sign language), interaction modalities and personalisation features supported by the player are described. To conclude, the availability of newly created and adapted culture-related accessible VR360 content is explored, as a proof of the potential of the contributions work in this sector.

A GPU implementation is given for real-time visualization of aggregate eye movements (gaze) via heatmaps. Parallelization of the algorithm leads to substantial speedup over its CPU-based implementation and, for the first time, allows real-time rendering of heatmaps atop video. GLSL shader colorization allows the choice of color ramps. Several luminance-based color maps are advocated as alternatives to the popular rainbow color map, considered inappropriate (harmful) for depiction of (relative) gaze distributions.

Our work serves as an assay of the visual impact of text chunking on live (respoken) subtitles. We evaluate subtitles constructed with different chunking methods to determine whether segmentation influences comprehension or otherwise affects the viewing experience. Disparities in hearing participants' recorded eye movements over four styles of subtitling suggest that chunking reduces the amount of time spent reading subtitles.

The desire to make media available for all has been rapidly accepted and implemented by most European countries. Opera, as one of the many audiovisual representations, also falls under the category of production which needs to be made accessible and this article aims to analyse how opera has gone through a complete transformation to become a cultural event for all, overcoming not only linguistic but also sensorial barriers. The first part of the article analyses the various forms of translation associated with opera and the main challenges they entail. The second presents different systems used to make opera accessible to the sensorially challenged, highlighting their main difficulties. Examples from research carried out at the Barcelona's Liceu opera house are presented to illustrate various modalities, especially audio description. All in all, it is our aim to show how translated-related processes have made it possible to open opera to a wider audience despite some initial reluctance.

Audio description (AD) has established itself as a media access service for blind and partially sighted people across a range of countries, for different media and types of audiovisual performance (e.g. film, TV, theatre, opera). In countries such as the UK and Spain, legislation has been implemented for the provision of AD on TV, and the European Parliament has requested that AD for digital TV be monitored in projects such as DTV4ALL (www.psp-dtv4all.org) in order to be able to develop adequate European accessibility policies. One of the drawbacks is that in their current form, AD services largely leave the visually impaired community excluded from access to foreign-language audiovisual products when they are subtitled rather than dubbed. To overcome this problem, audio subtitling (AST) has emerged as a solution. This article will characterise audio subtitling as a modality of audiovisual localisation which is positioned at the interface between subtitling, audio description and voice-over. It will argue that audio subtitles need to be delivered in combination with audio description and will analyse, systematise and exemplify the current practice of audio description with audio subtitling using commercially available DVDs.

Audio description is nowadays increasingly popular. This is due to the rising social awareness of media accessibility along with the many European Union directives which make national broadcasters responsible for providing audiovisual programmes whose content has to be accessible to all. To date, little scientific research has been undertaken in this area, while two important facts are now a reality: the definition of guidelines and national standards, and the increasing practice of translation for audio description. These two trends call for scientific studies which, in turn, should provide data to be used in view of a possible harmonization of audio description standards throughout Europe. The idea of working towards a European common accessibility resource centre will mean a step forward towards ‘Media for All’ 2 . View all notes to follow the EU directive ‘TV without Frontiers’. This article is the result of an empirical study investigating one of the many thorny issues in audio description: the reception of a film narrative by a given culture (Spanish), along with contrastive analyses with two other different cultures (US and Greek). The results which the article yields put into question the current bibliography on audio description, which has so far overlooked issues of perception across different cultures.