Birthday cake with audio description: accessibility and commensality for people with visual impairment

Abstract

The birthday cake is a symbolic element of the gastronomic ritual that passes through generations and cultures. With the interest in knowing the relevance of this product in the lives of people with visual impairments, addressing accessibility in gastronomy, field research was carried out using a semi-structured questionnaire followed by projective interviews. The stories and memories about the cake associated with their own birthdays demonstrated the relevance of this gastronomic element in the lives of the thirty-three participants with visual impairments of this study. Despite their knowledge about audio description (AD), they never had access to AD applied to birthday cakes and, after learning about it, they emphasized the informative potential of this resource. Therefore, we suggest that the resource should be applied to promote communication accessibility and for the knowledge and identification not only of birthday cakes, but of several other products, in addition to gastronomic ones.