slow emergency siren, ongoing was a project to make Black Audio Film Collective’s ‘Handsworth Songs’ more, and differently, accessible.

It developed as a year-long collaboration, co-led by LUX and Sarah Hayden, as part of a research project called Voices in the Gallery. Together, we commissioned Elaine Lillian Joseph to write and perform augmented audio description for ‘Handsworth Songs’, and invited the Care-fuffle Working Group to develop creative captions. Audio-description and caption-users advised on the translations of sounds and images as they evolved. Sound artist Hannah Kemp-Welch was invited to develop Voices Surface: an Audio-Documentary about Accessing ‘Handsworth Songs’.

Graphic design is by Daly & Lyon, and web development is by An Endless Supply. Both formats have been designed with access to the fore, and both print and digital forms of this publication developed through consultation with UKAAF: the UK Association for Accessible Formats. The book and website make the captions and audio description available as texts that can be read or heard. We hope that they will permit a new kind of engagement with these creative forms of cross-modal translation.