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FRANNY: I have four copies of my talk, two of which are in large print, and I have two
print copies of my slides, if anybody can't see them. Likewise, these are all posted in
duplicate to the site. If you downloaded them before like 1am, they've changed.
[audience laughter]
You'll see.
If you had asked me ten years ago what kinds of work I would be doing as an adult, I probably
wouldn't have guessed "making comics for the blind." But here we are.
I am a creator of a comic called Oh ***, I'm in Grad School! And I build in text descriptions
slash transcriptions for visually impaired readers as part of my process.
This interest partially dates back to a 2010 COMIXSCHOLARS_L listserv conversation, on
accommodating visually impaired students in a course that assigns comics.
I chimed in, in this conversation, with my personal knowledge of how webcomics manage
transcriptions and how I hoped it might make them more accessible. And this was before
I had built my site.
For example, Oh No Robot is a service that crowdsources transcriptions of a large variety
of web comics for searchability purposes. It's really focused on writing down the dialogue
of the images, but it's pretty massive and it's run by the cartoonist Ryan North.
As well as that, some webcomics actually have a built-in full transcript. If you've ever
viewed the source of an XKCD page, you can see the div, the hidden div called transcript
and there are detailed text descriptions of all the comics, and they're quite good. They're
really detailed.
But. Despite all of that, other people on the listserv reacted very differently to this
prospect of talking about transcribing comics. Some people on the list saw visually impaired
students as an instance for panic -- several scholars admitted they were scared that a
blind student would sign up for their comics class and basically ruin their fun, which
is pretty horrifying.
Many people also wondered about the possibilities of tactile comics, if we could only print
comics in raised ink, that would solve the problem. I don't really think that's the case.
I think comes from this romanticized notion of blindness. The disability studies scholar
Georgina Kleege has written about the hypothetical blind man, the subject of thought experiments
throughout history. And I think that people responded by, if only we could make comics
for the hypothetical blind reader, like Helen Keller or Daredevil, they could just touch
it and that would communicate the information.
There's this idea of blind readers as longing for the visual-verbal experience of reading
a comic that they lack, as opposed to, "I want to know what happens to Buffy in season
8," which is a real documented problem. The Buffy TV show had built in visual-verbal descriptions
because that's part of broadcast television shows, but the sequel comic to the series
was not officially transcribed in that way. But fans were able to provide a solution for
other disabled fans.
I was reminded of this old conversation by the recent news about Philipp Meyer's "Tactile
Storytelling" -- he's an interaction designer and has produced as part of his graduate course
work a tactile comic for the blind, called "Life."
It's interesting but problematic -- basically a (heteronormative) textural story about two
circles who fall in love and have a baby that shares their textures, and then they die.
[laughter]
So, he has a visual version online, that you can see. For some reason, you can change the
colors of the circles if you click on it, and there's a link to that in my online materials.
I've been making accessible comics in various forms for several years now, but they're nowhere
near as shiny or visionary. I "just" verbally describe comic strips that I post online.
Over the years since I first started doing it my process has been streamlined a bit.
So, just to show you some examples, this is an older, three-panel comic about a bird.
And I wrote like a really detailed kind of script-thing for it. The content isn't quite
as important as the length and the breakdown of multiple panels. Since then, I've really
gotten into stick figures. And so this image is like an entire one of my recent comics.
And I've transitioned into posting them on tumblr, and in disability communities on tumblr
it's typical to just write a caption for things. And so I have my image, and then I usually
comment on it, and then below that I have a transcription set off as image.
Romantic [read:ableist, uninformed] notions of blindness don't always match up with the
material reality of needs of people who are visually impaired or have what I've seen in
recent stuff called a "print disability."
For example, the majority of visually impaired people have some vision, or used to be able
to see (so yes, you do need to mention colors in your image descriptions, if you didn't
know that).
For example, Sky McCloud has written, "From my perspective, images are rarely the
problem since I, for the most part, simply enlarge them. When I'm on my computer there
are a lot of tools I can use to enlarge images. Honestly browsing the web is the least of
my troubles I wish there were Alt Tags for life but that's not happening."
Furthermore, braille literacy is only 12% among school-aged blind children today, according
to the National Braille Press. So, so much for your tactile comic.
Users with "print disabilities," however, are entitled to free, outside of copyright
permissions, access to books under the Chafee amendment to copyright law.
But these digital books have to preserve images because 80% of users who are using them are
actually learning disabled or dyslexic and so they can't just have a text-only thing.
I've been reading recently about a nonprofit called Bookshare that has started doing crowdsourced
image transcription for digital books, using a piece of software called POET.
They have something called "image slams," where people gather around a table, look at
a bunch of images, and collectively work together to go through a lot of them and collectively
describe them. I really want to go to an image slam.
And in their "User Experience Considerations" they publish very detailed materials on describing
different kinds of images. They do a lot of work with STEM textbooks, which makes me a
little sad because I don't want to read those for fun, but...
[laughter]
They get a lot of requests. And the detailed quotes are in my talk, but they, for example,
mention keeping out extra words in descriptions. So, my first instinct in a transcription like
this where I signpost all the different parts of the image, like, "this comic has three
panels," the floating text, all this stuff... They recommend against that to reduce the
word load for screen reading software, and try to be more concise about things.
They say, "Also, try not to add extra information to the description that interprets the image."
We're getting into some pretty serious Roland Barthes territory in this way that they talk
about not talking about images but describing them.
On this note, there is some consensus that it is better to not transcribe the images
you yourself have created, which is counter to the workflow I've developed when creating
my own comic. So, considering where image description would fit into the digital rhetoric
workflow -- that might be something to think about.
So, even though verbal image descriptions are the gold standard for making multimedia
texts more accessible in this particular way, they also don't always match up with people's
personal definitions of what makes something a "comic."
In the past year I've encountered criticism from some fellow comics creators that a comic
can't be meaningfully described or transcribed in words, and, if you do so, it makes it not
a comic anymore. And I was also horrified by that idea. But... I didn't even expect
that one to come up.
The question comes down to, are comics things that contain information or are they a holistic
experience that requires non-verbal modalities to "truly" experience?
Is the important thing the panels, which Phillip Meyer's tactile comic preserves at the expense
of a complex story?
If comics are being increasingly taken up in non-recreational genres, such as composition
textbooks, that might be required for a course that isn't explicitly a comics or art class
that people who have visual impairments might just avoid, then whether or not something
is lost in the process we have to be pretty realistic about the fact that we're using
them to corral information.
But accessibility isn't... How am I on time? OK.
[laughter]
All right, I'm good.
So, to wrap up: accessibility isn't just a condition you have or don't have, it's something
you do.
And as well as being a practice, it's a social practice. No individual is going to make all
visual texts accessible to non-light perceiving blind people. There are at least two people
involved, the describer and the user of the description. A practice I've read about in
the comic book fan community is even just having friends read and describe comics out
loud.
The researcher Josh Miele is working on crowdsourced video descriptions, so getting beyond just
the large broadcasters provide verbal description of images. Basically like a rifftrax for visually
impaired people, like an additional audio track distributed separately from movies that
will describe the images. So he's working on a crowdsourced system for that, that he
describes as both "technological and social." As I've mentioned before, serialized webcomics
have their own crowdsourced transcription program, though nothing like this exists,
to my knowledge, for print or e-book comics.
This roundtable is a great start at thinking about how to better integrate access practices
into our personal and collaborative workflows, and if I didn't focus enough on the nuts and
bolts of describing an image or comic, I'd be happy to answer questions in the Q&A.
And I'll end by going back to my title of the talk, Would Helen Keller Be a Marvel Zombie?
which is a slang term for people who are really, really big Marvel comics fans. And I came
up with this title and then I didn't know the answer to the question. I was like, what
comics would Helen Keller read? Would she like Daredevil, or would she think it's dumb?
[laughter]
And so I was like, if comics were accessible to her, I think she would read all of them.
And... that's all I got. Thank you.
[applause]