Sarah McDonagh
Sarah McDonagh has experience working with the digital archive The Prisons Memory Archive in Northern Ireland to create descriptive guides of the controversial prison of the Maze and Long Kesh. Sarah’s principal research interests are in media accessibility, particularly subjects related to accessibility of digital heritage, which includes access facilities such as audio description, touch tours, British and Irish sign language interpreting, and captioning for the Deaf and hard of hearing.
Sarah has been involved in the EU-funded Accessibility, Culture and Training (ACT) project, in collaboration with various partners across the UK and leading institutions in Europe. She has also worked with the Prisons Memory Archive to design accessible content for people of varying sensory abilities, as well as address key ethical considerations regarding heritage management and preservation. She is currently involved in the H2020 GreenSCENT project, working as part of an international team to engage people with environmental issues in their local area through the development of accessible applications and digital platforms.
Marta Brescia-Zapata
Marta Brescia Zapata is a researcher with expertise in Audiovisual Translation and Media Accessibility and a professional translator. Her research interests include audiovisual translation and media accessibility, as well as immersive and interactive digital media.
She holds a PhD in subtitling within VR 360º environments supported by the Catalan Government through the FI funding scheme (2020FI_B 00814). From 2020 to 2022 she collaborated with the EU H2020 TRACTION project, and from 2022 to 2023 she participated in the EU H2020 GreenSCENT project.
She is currently a postdoctoral researcher working on the Athena project, an Erasmus+ project aiming at developing a set of recommendations on integrating accessibility and design for all into the Higher Education curricula.
Aida Villaécija
Aida Villaécija is a linguist and a translator, specializing in Sign Linguistics. She holds a PhD in Translation and Language Sciences from Pompeu Fabra University (2023). Aida’s main research interests are in corpus development and accessibility, as well asmorphology, in both spoken and sign languages.
Since 2019, she has been collaborating with the Institut d’Estudis Catalans (IEC) on the creation of the first reference corpus and the lexical database of Catalan Sign Language(LSC). She has also been involved in several projects related to Catalan Sign Language, such as Microdiachrony in Endangered Languages across Modalities or the Sign-Hub Project.
Currently, she is a postdoctoral researcher involved in the WEL project, working to provide oral texts in Easy Language in cultural visits and video games.
