As a consequence of Portaria 661, an official document issued by the Portuguese Ministry of Communications in October 2008, which postponed once again the accessibility law that determines that audio description should be made available for two hours daily on the Brazilian open television, professionals, researchers and teachers of audio description still have to rely on private initiatives from DVD producers to keep promoting audio description in the country. One of these initiatives was mediated by the first national association of audiodescribers, MIDIACE (Associação Mídia Acessível), founded at the end of 2008 by academics from three educational institutions. Motivated by the theme of the film Blindness (Ensaio sobre a Cegueira), the adaptation of the book by the Portuguese writer José Saramago launched towards the end of 2008, by the reaction that the film caused in the blind community (starting in the United States), and by the fact that its director was the Brazilian Fernando Meirelles, the key founders of the Brazilian association offered to audio describe the film for the DVD launched in January, 2009, by Fox Distributor.
This paper aims to report on the audio description steps taken – from the first draft of the script to its final recording – focusing on both the main challenges that were encountered and the changes that occurred in the description process. Most of all, this paper aims to demonstrate the effects of the non-monitored recording of the audio description script by a dubbing laboratory chosen by the distributors with practically no knowledge of audio description standards.

Eliana FRANCO obtained her PhD in Letters from the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium) in February 2000, where she defended a thesis on the voice-over translation of documentaries about Brazil, produced and translated by West Europeans. She also undertook post-doctoral studies at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona in 2006-2007. Her main specialisation area is audiovisual translation. At present, she is a lecturer of English and Translation in the undergraduate and post-graduate courses of the Faculty of Letters at the Federal University of Bahia (Brazil), where she also coordinates the research group TRAMAD (Translation, Media and Audiodescription). Her main academic interests are audiodescription, subtitling and voice-over, media accessibility, film adaptation and conference interpreting. She has published both nationally and internationally, and has co-authored a book on voice-over translation to be published by St. Jerome this year. She is the vice-president of the Brazilian Association of Reasearchers of Translation called ABRAPT.