The Ways of Synesthetic Translation: Design models for media accessibility

Synesthetic translation, historically applied to artistic productions and in the twentieth century applied by scholars to neuroscience to explain the unity of the senses, is addressed, defined and illustrated in this paper with regard to designing access to content. In particular, the paper shows how the concept of accessibility, underlying every interlinguistic translation process, may be promoted by synesthetic translations, i.e. particular types of intersemiotic translation – among various codes (verbal, figurative, sonorous, etc.) – in which the original text (prototext) and the translated text (metatext) use different sensory registers. The goal is to achieve a form of design that grants everyone access to content (design for all). This paper compares synesthetic practices in typhlology, i.e. aimed at the blind, with extravisual communication design techniques. The conclusion is that all too often, despite having access to the necessary tools, visual designers tend to neglect the needs of the disabled.