Our projects

DramaBooks, established in 2015, is a cultural association that produces accessible multimedia works, such as scripted audiobooks, plays, acted comics, and unpublished works.
The association, which is self-supporting through its members, was born on August 5, 2015, from an idea of Germano Carella, a blind actor, intent on fostering the integration of visually impaired actors in the field of acting, The idea was concretized thanks to the meeting with actors Annarita Picazio and Giancarlo Picci, his classmates at the "Pietro Scharoff" Academy of Dramatic Art in Rome, and was consolidated through the help of other professionals who, with their free commitment, contribute to developing ideas and services to support the project.

DramaBooks aims, through the collaboration of disabled and able-bodied actors, to bring anyone closer to various art forms through the use of voice and acting skills.

Through voice, one can succeed in introducing theatrical texts, films, books, and comics, thus making it easier for anyone interested to enjoy them.

For this reason, DramaBooks intends to train aspiring actors, both disabled and non-disabled, through diction and dramatized reading courses delivered online, which can also be useful for those who want to improve public speaking or radio skills.
DramaBooks targets the widest possible audience; therefore, all the works we produce will be made available on the web.

Current projects:

Drama Courses, are courses aimed at the creation of multimedia works.
These courses, aim at the involvement of actors and non-actors, including blind people.
The goal is the creation of a work that will be published on our website.

Dramabooks: this is the main project for which DramaBooks was founded.
The pleasure of listening to a book, as if it were a movie: voices, sounds and music bring novels, novellas, short stories, fan fiction and plays to life.
DramaBooks tries, as much as possible, to be faithful to the original works.
A work is adapted to dramabook and recorded, as if it were an audiofilm. The intent of our association is to present the authors' works to the public as they conceived them: by not distorting the stories, everything remains the same; the narrated parts, image descriptions are treated with sounds, voices and music.

Future projects:

VoiceComic - The comic book that speaks
Comics have a great importance in literature. This world is so vast that a lifetime is not enough to explore it.
This literary genre has always been precluded to people who are blind because it is a film on paper. This preclusion is all the more felt by children and young people, who are excluded from a world of fantasy and joy so useful to their education. Dramabooks is very sensitive to the world of the youngest and therefore would like to give voice to many of the most beloved comics. The comic strip is a script already written, just waiting to be acted out. To do so, it will therefore have to be subjected to a script, and silent cartoons, that is, those containing only pictures, will be replaced by acoustic icons (sound pictures) or textual audiodescriptions. DramaBooks is equipped with an audio/video player that is accessible to the sensory disabled; the text descriptions are read automatically by the screen readers of blind users.

Gamebooks - the interactive books
In the 1980s, text adventures were all the rage, that is, games where the user, by performing actions, built the story step by step, reaching the conclusion after fighting, casting spells etc.
DramaBooks wants to repurpose those adventures in the form of interactive books: characters will play their parts based on the players' actions.

Dramalive - Theater for all
Dramalive plays are designed for a visually impaired audience: theater is made of voices, but also of looks and gestures. Sometimes it is very difficult to describe a play in real time, because it is very fast-paced and complex.
Thanks to our audio/video player, plays, musicall and operas, as well as comics, can be told in text form.
DramaBooks wants to offer the great works, as well as unpublished ones, audio-described for the blind; wherever possible creating live events, which will be available on our online platform even for those who physically cannot attend.

DramaLearn - Scripted Education.
Culture is fundamental and is learned by going to school. Helping students by having them listen to works specifically designed for school is a task DramaBooks would like to fulfill.
From fairy tales for the youngest, to scripted history, to the great works of Italian and foreign literature.

Movies with speech - The audio-described films
Audio-described movies could not be missing.
Thanks to this innovative audio/video player, creating audiodescriptions is easier.
Movies, short films, independent films, TV series, cartoons, everything can find a place in our pages.
DramaBooks would like, in time, to activate this very useful service as well, since filmmaking is also an important part of the artistic world.
DramaShort and Webseries
Webseries and independent short films have existed on the web for years now.
DramaBooks would like to offer its members the opportunity to enjoy them in an accessible mode: the visually impaired can watch short films and the webseries, the visually impaired listen, with the same player, to the audiodescription through their screen reader that will read the texts of the audiodescriptions.

Drama Spot: This idea of drama spots comes from the need to support the costs of our currently self-produced works without financial aid. At one time, commercial products were advertised through sketches aired on national television, our idea is to package precisely sketches produced by us to advertise on our site, companies, for an appropriate fee, who will be able to take advantage of this service, thus ensuring that dramabooks have the means to continue with their work to help the inclusion in social life of people with visual impairments but at the same time facilitate collaboration between able-bodied people and people with disabilities.

DramaPaintings: the idea is to allow through language, access to the feelings that the paintings produce to the viewer. Not being able to make use of colors and shapes we would narrate the paintings and the emotions they arouse, thus also providing the blind with a key to be able to learn about art. The undertaking is ambitious but with the help also of texts by authoritative critics we are convinced that this is possible.