Comics for the Sight Impaired

[NinjaNezumi]

have any of you thought about creating youtube videos or downloadable podcasts as audio supplements for the vision impaired for your comics or other projects?

[Killbert-Robby]

I regularly update a comic about two mutes, you read it by rubbing the braille on your monitor.

[NinjaNezumi]

I assume you're trying to make a joke, it's not funny.

[Killbert-Robby]

So you think making a comic for blind people is a bad joke eh? S'good to see where you stand on this very serious topic.

[NinjaNezumi]

This is what made me think you were making a bad joke:

you read it by rubbing the braille on your monitor.

it still looks like a poor attempt at a joke. If it's not then I assume you misworded the sentence.

Now there are Braille monitor/displays, however, they are so expensive, clunky and rare it's unrealistic.

This is a reality:
http://www.disabled-world.com/assistive ... eaders.php

YouTube is apparently blind accessible, as they promote a form of captioning that is readable by audio outputs.

There are plenty of comics in the comic world which are storyline comics, and thus the visuals are easily substituted with simple description.

[Terotrous]

I think the thing is, that comics are ultimately a medium that combines art and writing. If you remove one or the other, you're left with either a picture or a story, and it probably won't be as good as if it was made to be that way.

It's kind of like how when you hear an ad on the radio, and it's clearly a television ad, it frequently just doesn't work without the pictures.

I suspect the vision-impaired are probably better served by things like audio books than just the text from a comic.

[Kirb]

Comics are an intensely visual medium, so no.

[NinjaNezumi]

I think the thing is, that comics are ultimately a medium that combines art and writing. If you remove one or the other, you're left with either a picture or a story, and it probably won't be as good as if it was made to be that way.

It's kind of like how when you hear an ad on the radio, and it's clearly a television ad, it frequently just doesn't work without the pictures.

I suspect the vision-impaired are probably better served by things like audio books than just the text from a comic.

I do not agree. Look at Dr McNinja, look at Flaky Pastry, or how about one of my favorite comics - Alley Oop.

All those comics - while containing visual elements - can also be translated into the literary form. There are great works of comedic literature in the world which make it look and feel like you're reading a comic strip.

btw, pls don't think I suggest that any of those strips are better off without the art, I love dr mcninja flaky and alley oop's art. all I'm saying is that it's a simple matter to capture what they so painstakingly display with their own talent.

[Killbert-Robby]

This is what made me think you were making a bad joke:

you read it by rubbing the braille on your monitor.

it still looks like a poor attempt at a joke. If it's not then I assume you misworded the sentence.

It's about two MUTES! Thats why it works on ANY monitor! It's all been thought out very carefully.

Also, Dr McN could NEVER be translated to pure audio. "He rides robo dracula down to Earth like a surfboard" is nowhere NEAR as epic as seeing it. Half the humor and fun is seeing the epic stuff. "Dr McNinja and Judy highfive in front of an explosion" has very little... oompf

The visually impared will never see the little nuances, the little facial expression that is JUST right will be "Steve smiles". Comics are sequential art. When you remove the art, they're just text. When its just text being read, its just an audio book. And depending on the quality of writing, could be quite a crap audio book. Comics are written with the knowledge there'll be accompanying images.

[McDuffies]

Meh. If I was blind but curious about reading those new fancy Persepollis books because everyone around me is saying that it's great stuff, I guess I would be willing to settle for picture-less version even though it's lesser - I mean if my other choice was settling for never ever reading the book at all.

[NinjaNezumi]

Maybe I'm just awesomesauce when it comes to comedic writing, but Dr McNinja riding a Robotic Dracula would be perfect in the written word:

http://drmcninja.com/page.php?pageNum=44&issue=11

"and McNinja's boots erupted in a fantastic display of compressed air, vaulting both he and Dracula through the airless space and into the dark void with a mission. The blood drinking dragon must die.
Brow furrowed, Dr McNinja contemplated the distance and time it'd take before the sun's radiation would burn through the pale skin of the cannibalistic monster, how long it'd take before the blood he received from the enviled Red Cross would boil under his flesh, whether or not Gordo could understand his great sacrifice, and if Judy would would finally replace those collector's dinnerplates she broke the week before. All of this while Dracula's mouth remained agape at the stars. By god! It was full of stars!
Then, through the soundless space, the good doctor, savior of the world, martyr from the shadows, #1 Ghostbusters fan, saw the most stunning sight he could ever see. All things considering, it wasn't a bad way to go."


That's what I'd write for that page, leaving the reader on a cliffhanger, while tossing in two references, 2010 movie (2001 novel) and Ghostbusters. This is me on a low day. You can't tell me this isn't decently gripping, and mildly comedic. Obviously if I had more time I'd re-write it and I'm sure the actual writer of Dr McNinja would have something else, possibly better, to place in words.

I couldn't think of anything funny for Judy so I just wrote she busted some collector's plates.


I can do that, and better, to anything, anywhere, on any of these comic pages. It can be done.

[Kirb]

You can do that, but then it ceases to be a comic in any way.

Blind people who surf the internet is a bit of a niche audience, so I'd be surprised if anyone would do it in such a way.

[NinjaNezumi]

You can do that, but then it ceases to be a comic in any way.

Blind people who surf the internet is a bit of a niche audience, so I'd be surprised if anyone would do it in such a way.

Again I don't agree.

How many comics are signed up with RSS Feed?


RSS Feeds are used by the blind. They are critical for blind people who use the web.

If blind people who browsed the net were such a niche market, then the captioning agencies for Google video and YouTube would not be blind capable. Yet they are.

I think the truth is closer to "Blind people don't read webcomics as much as others because comics aren't being made as readily accessible to the blind."

[Kirb]

If you disagree that blind people using the internet is a niche audience, I'm not exactly sure what else I can say.

[LibertyCabbage]

The effort would be much better spent doing radio plays, which is kind of its own thing.

The reality is that blind people are just not able to experience visual art, and it's pointless to spend significant time and effort "translating" comics into literature for this very limited audience when there are already a practically infinite amount of books they have available to them via audio books or orators.

[Pimpette]

You can do that, but then it ceases to be a comic in any way.

Blind people who surf the internet is a bit of a niche audience, so I'd be surprised if anyone would do it in such a way.

Again I don't agree.

How many comics are signed up with RSS Feed?

RSS Feeds are used by the blind. They are critical for blind people who use the web.

...the majority of comic makers don't create an RSS for the sake of blind people. It's generally done when a comic's schedule is so erratic that readers prefer just to be notified when it updates, rather than checking the site every so often and possibly missing a page or two.


Personally I moved into comics because my writing wasn't good enough to rely on itself alone. With comics I can use visuals to advance a story much better than I could simply with words - so I don't think I'd make a very good comic-for-the-blind.
And I couldn't let anyone put together a written (er, audio) version because I'm a control freak about my comics and I'd go batshit about the details.

[McDuffies]

Are books for blind usually created by publishers of original books? I got impression that they're usually made by publishers or organizations that are specialized in that stuff? I mean, there's plenty of categories of people with special needs, it seems to be that one artist wouldn't be able to cover all of them, even if he tried. Which is actually why each of those categories has organizations that take care of their needs. If anyone, those organizations should know whether blind people actually want to read comics in the first place, whether there's a call for translating comics into form suitable for them or not.

Incidentally there should be an organization taking care of the needs of us "non-French-speaking" people. I mean organization dedicated to translating French comics to english, because publishers sure as hell aren't going to do that, and we who don't speak French like to read good comics too.

[Randyraven]

I'd say that if you do what you're talking about it would simply be a novelization of the strip and, at that point, would cease to be a comic at all. I've written several fantasy/fiction books that I would love to convert to graphic novels but I can't because I'm simply not that patient. They're two separate art mediums that can exist together as one... but one or the other is not both. That seems to be the popular consensus of the replies on this thread anyway. I'd say that if you disagree so strongly with it you should do it... Make this vision of yours a reality. If it works out better than any of us could have foreseen then I'd be more than willing to admit being wrong on thinking it's a waste of time. After all, most visionaries in history were at one point rejected by their peers... while vice versa the majority of those rejected by their peers were not visionaries.

[Reinder]

The assumption among most commenters here seems to be that people are either perfectly sighted or completely blind - a lazy assumption that Bruce Tognazzini, former interaction designer for Apple, has some things to say about: Inclusive Design, Part One, Inclusive Design, Part Two. Read those and throw the "all or nothing", "we can't give blind people the full experience so why give them anything at all?" or "let's tack on some features as an afterthought" mentality out of the window. Instead, design your comic and website from the ground up so that people with a range of impairments can use it.

Sight impairments:
Many people are near-sighted. Everyone in my family is. That is usually easily corrected and in any case the computer monitor is usually close.
About five percent of all males have some form of colorblindness. When was the last time you tested your site and comic in an online colorblindness simulator? (Ur....... two years ago, in my case)
My parents are in their late sixties and have aging, presbyopic eyes. They need large print on their monitor - does your website force small type, low-contrast type or white-on-black with seriphs? Give people a way to set their own type size easily. (I can see reading glasses in my near future myself.)
For more severe vision impairments, you could provide a magnifying glass feature. This can be implemented in DHTML/Java or you can point to a [url=http://imagezoom.yellowgorilla.net/]browser plugin[/ur] that does this. This group will also benefit from screen-readable text hidden in the alt attribute or elsewhere on your site, as will very young readers, the completely blind or readers with severe dyslexia and other learning disabilities.

Speaking of which, studies have shown that if you design with some consideration for the very young, the very old or people with learning disabilities, everybody else also benefits because completing tasks on a website becomes easier for everyone. Get ahead of everyone else by designing inclusively!

(Do I practice what I preach? Not fully, yet. I've only recently started thinking about these things again. But the next iteration of my website will have more of these considerations built in)

[Killbert-Robby]

You can do that, but then it ceases to be a comic in any way.

Blind people who surf the internet is a bit of a niche audience, so I'd be surprised if anyone would do it in such a way.

Correction. Your market is for blind people who surf the internet and enjoy comics but don't mind one frame being translated into a long winded 20 minute dialog (A picture says a thousand words, and with every strip coming up to four panels or so, God help us all), and who appreciate the humor of a certain comic, for sake of argument, Dr McNinja

Thats right. Your market is made up of both those people.

And while I feel the plight of the visually impaired man who needs his fix of CTRL+ALT+DEL, the market is way too small for putting in the time, money and work it takes to put everything into audio with different voices for all the characters and good recording quality.


And as people have said over and over, once it doesn't have pictures its NOT A COMIC.
It's an audiobook.
And to be honest I think the results won't be as awesome as they sound. While my imagination says "Penny Arcade as read by Betty White", the result will probably be something like "Sinfest as read by Bill O'Reilly"

*Edit*
And I had to laugh at the part about blind people not reading comics because comics so far haven't been made blind-friendly. Seriously, it's like complaining that music isn't geared towards deaf people (Despite what cheesy heart-string-tugging movies from the 90s show). You seriously, SERIOUSLY, can't complain that it's our fault that a VISUAL MEDIUM isn't being used by people WHO CANT SEE.

And I wouldn't oversell your writing ability. Thats the thing with having to rewrite everything - DrMcN is a finely tuned pastiche, per se, something that just brushes on the right side of absurdity. When trying to encapsulate everything you see in a frame into text, unless you're gifted, and I mean truly gifted, not "super 1337 at comedic writing", you'll end up sounding like you're writing a bad fanfiction.