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Dear Readers, As the guest editors of this special issue of JAT, we hope that you will enjoy reading the selected articles and that they will inspire you to explore new research avenues. It has been a pleasure for us to edit this issue and to acquaint ourselves with the research presented in it. We hope that our introduction will also provide food for thought. We have always enjoyed working in audiovisual translation and media accessibility and trust that it will continue to be a thriving, expanding and creative field of practice and research. Mary Carroll and Aline Remael

This chapter offers an overview of audio description research and practice for the theatre. It approaches theatre audio description from the perspective of Multimodal Translation Studies and Functional Translation Studies with the aim to elicit the core features that are specific to audio description for the theatre and shape the process or workflow as well as its ultimate presentation at the time of the performance. The chapter first discusses the traditional features that characterize audio description for theatrical performances. Next, it looks at state of the art evolutions in theatre audio description research and practice. Core issues are illustrated with concrete examples from Milo Rau’s challenging staging of Compassie at NTGent in Belgium in 2020. The chapter arguments that the hybridity of much contemporary theatre, technological innovation in the field and the changing perception of what accessibility can or should be, make it quite impossible to formulate general guidelines. Each performance must be approached as a new challenge, involving a complex decision-making process.

Book review Author Biography Aline Remael, University of Antwerp www.alineremael.be References Branson, J. (2018, June 4–5). Bridging the maker–user gap: The case of the Italian short film Acquario [Paper presentation]. Understanding Media Accessibility Quality (UMAQ) Conference, Barcelona, Spain. Greco, G. M. (2018). The case for accessibility studies. Journal of Audiovisual Translation, 1(1), 205–232. https://doi.org/10.47476/jat.v1i1.51 Remael, A., Orero, P., Black, S., & Jankowska, A. (2019). From translators to accessibility managers: How did we get there and how do we train them? In M. Tolosa Igualada & A. Echeverri (Eds.), Porque algo tiene que cambiar: La formacion de traductores e interpretes, presente y futuro / Because something should change: Present and future training of translators and interpreters. MonTI, 11. https://rua.ua.es/dspace/bitstream/10045/99831/1/MonTI_11_01_en.pdf

In the field of Media Accessibility, audio introductions (AIs) are usually approached as an addition to audio description (AD) services for the blind and visually impaired. The present paper, however, approaches AIs as a research topic and translation service in its own right. AIs are a unique type of media accessibility service that contributes to the translation of multisemiotic works, and which has not received much attention within academia. As more different and complex performances are being produced and described, practitioners and researchers are constantly facing new challenges. Against this background, the present paper first discusses the possible functions of AIs, based on a qualitative analysis of a multilingual corpus of AIs. Subsequently, the presence and relative weight of these functions is analysed on the basis of the AIs to two Dutch contemporary theatre performances. They demonstrate how varying AI strategies are deployed by describers to fulfil different functions in different contexts, reflecting the demands of the performance at hand.