This introduction links the 15 articles included in this special issue to the central theme of the conference Media for All 9: Complex understandings, which took place in Stockholm in 2019. The special issue contains a selection of papers presented at the conference and offers an overview of state-of-the-art research in audiovisual translation and media accessibility. This introductory article highlights the main points of the different papers, and it also organises the contributions according to the different perspectives they take: product-based studies, process-based studies, training-based studies, user-based studies and policy-based studies.