Comics for the Sight Impaired

[Mercury Hat]

Pfft why does anyone go to plays when they can just read the play! It's not like there are various visual cues and actions taken by the director and actors that changes the feeling of the scene or anything.

If your comic can be written all out in prose and still exactly maintain the same overall experience, then you're doing comics wrong. Well-done comics use panel size, color, word bubbles, everything that's visually on the page to enhance the experience.

You can write it all out and get the same story, but the experience would be different. Do blind people miss out on that experience? Yes, sorry, but that's what happens when you have a society where its majority gets most of its information visually.

For someone who says they like comics, you sure don't seem to understand a lot about them.

[McDuffies]

Uh... did you folks read Reinder's post at all before replying? I suggest you read it, it's very informative.

[NinjaNezumi]

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)

I take some responsibility as I didn't explicitly state what I meant by sight impaired. But that is why I use that term instead of blind.

If you look at my site, you will see that I have done my best to make it capable for those with minor sight ailments. It's mostly only in 1-2 colors at any given point, I use large text. For my novels I allow the reader to zoom in. I'm considering about converting my comic to permit this as well.

That's why I have no backgrounds to my site and why people call it "plain".


Killbert-Robby:

I don't think you appreciate how much difficulty it is for those who surf the net with sight impairments. Whether it's only slight vision loss, colorblindness or other. For someone who cannot see your comic with clarity, a "long winded" 3 minute recording at best (what I wrote was scarcely 30 seconds), is a godsend and appreciated regardless of your recording skillz. You don't need voice actors, just decent enough diction and knowledge of windows recorder. Anyone can churn out a recording in five minutes or less.

Right now people use electronic readers, and let me tell you, they sound worse than anything you could ever record.

I'm not saying you HAVE to do this, I'm asking if you have ever thought about doing this. Now I will argue the point against you but I won't argue that you have to.



Mercury Hat :

I've never seen a web comic that conforms to the standards you have in place. I've seen a diVinci painting that does, but not a web comic. I also seriously advise you not to try to turn this into a debate of who knows what about comics, I do know their history and origin.

[K-Dawg]

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?

Nope.

[Reinder]

Colorblind Web Page Filter is fun to play with and useful for testing a new website colour scheme.

[NinjaNezumi]

Colorblind Web Page Filter is fun to play with and useful for testing a new website colour scheme.

thank you for that link ^_^ I will use it.

[Killbert-Robby]

I don't think you appreciate how much difficulty it is for those who surf the net with sight impairments. \

You're absolutely right. I also don't appreciate how hard it is for people in wheelchairs to rideroller coasters, or for babies to carry out open heart surgery, dogs to get korean lessons at a decent university, and a homeless man to pay his gas bill.
I am all for supporting the handicapped. Every time I buy so much as a bag of Fritos while I'm in Canada, my money goes to taxes which, round here, doesn't go to stealth bombers but goes to welfare checks, hospitals, etc. But, yes, when someone raises the idea that a *visual medium* should be more accessible to people who cant see, I stop and think, hey, wait a second, this isn't quite a practical idea like buying seeing-eye-dogs, this actually seems kinda silly.

Imagine how different the reception to this thread woulda been if you'd said "I feel that maybe we should run donation drives on our comics to raise money to help those who can't read comics by getting them seeing eye dogs, and new traffic-light-tone-emmiting-thingies, and fitting more buildings with braille"

I think the visually impaired would be more appreciative of you making their difficult chore of getting daily groceries easier, moreso than helping them listen to a comic that they may not even enjoy.

[Fishies]

My comic is aimed more towards deaf people.

(That filter site is fun though.)

[Turnsky]

I don't think you appreciate how much difficulty it is for those who surf the net with sight impairments. \

You're absolutely right. I also don't appreciate how hard it is for people in wheelchairs to rideroller coasters, or for babies to carry out open heart surgery, dogs to get korean lessons at a decent university, and a homeless man to pay his gas bill.
I am all for supporting the handicapped. Every time I buy so much as a bag of Fritos while I'm in Canada, my money goes to taxes which, round here, doesn't go to stealth bombers but goes to welfare checks, hospitals, etc. But, yes, when someone raises the idea that a *visual medium* should be more accessible to people who cant see, I stop and think, hey, wait a second, this isn't quite a practical idea like buying seeing-eye-dogs, this actually seems kinda silly.

Imagine how different the reception to this thread woulda been if you'd said "I feel that maybe we should run donation drives on our comics to raise money to help those who can't read comics by getting them seeing eye dogs, and new traffic-light-tone-emmiting-thingies, and fitting more buildings with braille"

I think the visually impaired would be more appreciative of you making their difficult chore of getting daily groceries easier, moreso than helping them listen to a comic that they may not even enjoy.

Robby, that horse is well and truly dead now, stop smacking it with your stick, you've made your point several times over. People who have impaired vision have every right to be entertained as everybody else.

[Reinder]

As for people in wheelchairs riding rollercoasters, Stephen Hawking went on the Vomit Comet. And he's not just in a wheelchair, he's usually hooked up to a life support system. It's hard to tell with a man with only limited capacity for facial expressions, but he seemed to have a very good time indeed.

[NinjaNezumi]

Imagine how different the reception to this thread woulda been if you'd said "I feel that maybe we should run donation drives on our comics to raise money to help those who can't read comics by getting them seeing eye dogs, and new traffic-light-tone-emmiting-thingies, and fitting more buildings with braille"

I'm honestly convinced you don't know what this thread is even about.

I was asking a simple question as to whether or not anyone has considered making their thread viable for visually impaired, and what avenues they've considered.

This is mainly because I'm thinking about doing it and am trying to figure out the most accessible fashion in which it can be done without detracting from the rest of the site.

Edit: I just deleted a large portion of my post. If you try again to insult me on charity work, I will repost what I deleted. just an FYI, I do a lot for various causes (one of which is a major project on my website - toraboardgame.com).


I want to get this thread back on track.

What do you guys think would be a better form of accessibility - a regular wma or wav file embedded in html? youtube (or other video) embedding? or pod cast downloadable links?

At first I was thinking about pod casting but if a virus happens to infest its way onto my system or onto the online file system I'm using, it would cause problems.

Youtube and other video services offer quite a bit of embedding features which saves on local bandwidth, however, youtube has been known to fileshare its videos, and I'm still not 100% certain on their accessibility availability. I've been trying to contact various vision impaired organizations but they never seem to call back and are always in meetings.

.wav and .wma embedding on html is nice, but it takes up space and not all webbrowsers are capable of handling those formats successfully. I don't know why, but I do get errors.

Does anyone else have any suggestions or ideas of which I should pursue?

I'm also seriously thinking of trying to exchange these types of services with web comic artists, if anyone is interested, such as 2 pages of written/recorded work of their comic for maybe 1 page of my own comic drawn. I still don't know yet though so I'm on the fence of that issue.

Throughout this next week I'm going to be reformatting all my pages into .swf files so they can be enlarged on the screen in the same fashion as my short stories and enovels. Andrew Colon should be posted by then.

[Killbert-Robby]

Robby, that horse is well and truly dead now, stop smacking it with your stick, you've made your point several times over. People who have impaired vision have every right to be entertained as everybody else.

You're absolutely right, I'm so sorry for saying that since we still haven't made it easy for them to live their daily lives, we should take care of that first. What oh ever was I thinking.

Of course sight impaired people can be entertained. There's TV for the sight impaired. I can go out and buy The Davinchi Code as read by at least 20 A-list celebrities. We print books in braille. Hell, put on some standup comedy, I'm sure if someone can't see it they'll still find it funny.
At no point did I say they didn't deserve to be entertained, I'm not saying TAKE TO THE STREETS, AND LETS TAKE AWAY THEIR BETTY WHITE AUDIO BOOKS. Jesus, I don't see what's so goddam wrong about saying fucking webcomics for the blind isn't the greatest idea since sliced bread, see they have a right to entertainment, I have a right to express when I don't think an idea is a good one, so 'scuse me, but the next dead horse I'll be beating is the high one you're riding on.

[Heart]

My theory is that as a child, Robby was molested by a blind guy. That's the only reason I can come up with for all the hostility he's showing.

[Turnsky]

Robby, that horse is well and truly dead now, stop smacking it with your stick, you've made your point several times over. People who have impaired vision have every right to be entertained as everybody else.

You're absolutely right, I'm so sorry for saying that since we still haven't made it easy for them to live their daily lives, we should take care of that first. What oh ever was I thinking.

Of course sight impaired people can be entertained. There's TV for the sight impaired. I can go out and buy The Davinchi Code as read by at least 20 A-list celebrities. We print books in braille. Hell, put on some standup comedy, I'm sure if someone can't see it they'll still find it funny.
At no point did I say they didn't deserve to be entertained, I'm not saying TAKE TO THE STREETS, AND LETS TAKE AWAY THEIR BETTY WHITE AUDIO BOOKS. Jesus, I don't see what's so goddam wrong about saying fucking webcomics for the blind isn't the greatest idea since sliced bread, see they have a right to entertainment, I have a right to express when I don't think an idea is a good one, so 'scuse me, but the next dead horse I'll be beating is the high one you're riding on.

I fail to see the point of your apparent hostility.
I also fail to see the point of basically repeating yourself quite a few times in the past thread, we get that you don't like the idea, but getting your panties in a bunch over it, is somewhat pointless overall, innit? Furthermore it's not in the general spirit of the thread, and some folks have developed innovative ways to cater to those who cannot see a comic, such as transcriptions, and radio plays.

[Harishankar]

For merely sight impaired, here are some suggestions to make your comic more accessible.

- > larger fonts and more readable fonts - this should be for everybody, not just vision impaired
- > a high contrast version if you do in colour (maybe just use some photoshop filters)
- > larger version (surely you could do a lesser scaled version from a high-res image with little effort)

That's all I can think of right now.

Even people with some form of myopia and who wear glasses will benefit from more readable text of course. (such as myself).

[NinjaNezumi]

- > larger version (surely you could do a lesser scaled version from a high-res image with little effort)

actually this is why I think I am going to start converting my comic to *.swf format.

Do a search on the web for free *.swf converters, I'll post the one I use on monday. It's called jpeg2swf.exe and came in a zipped bundle. It's a dos converter so you need to use the MS DOS gateway thingy on the computer.

You can right click and enhance.

Upside to *.swf - saves on bandwidth so you don't need a larger version, makes it more difficult for people to right click copy. You can right click zoom and move the page around for greater visually control.
Downside to *.swf - some older computers cannot read *.swf files and many times people need to activate Active-X controls.

[Harishankar]

actually this is why I think I am going to start converting my comic to *.swf format.

Do a search on the web for free *.swf converters, I'll post the one I use on monday. It's called jpeg2swf.exe and came in a zipped bundle. It's a dos converter so you need to use the MS DOS gateway thingy on the computer.

You can right click and enhance.

Upside to *.swf - saves on bandwidth so you don't need a larger version, makes it more difficult for people to right click copy. You can right click zoom and move the page around for greater visually control.
Downside to *.swf - some older computers cannot read *.swf files and many times people need to activate Active-X controls.

SWF is a good idea. I'm not sure how gradients and colour data will be translated though. Also SWF requires Flash plugin which might not be a universal option like JPG or PNG graphics. Also using another vector graphics format might be a good idea. Like SVG, but again browser support is required.

As an artist and a creative person, I think everybody should take pride in coming up with innovative ideas to cater to the less-fortunate. It should be a challenge and as artists, we shouldn't shy away from them.

[NinjaNezumi]

right click zoom and move the page around for greater visually control.
Downside to *.swf - some older computers cannot read *.swf files and many times people need to activate Active-X controls.

SWF is a good idea. I'm not sure how gradients and colour data will be translated though. Also SWF requires Flash plugin which might not be a universal option like JPG or PNG graphics. Also using another vector graphics format might be a good idea. Like SVG, but again browser support is required.[/quote]
You are correct it isn't as universal, which is why I've since decided to have my two different pandaking sites have different accessibility - jpg and swf.

JPG is the most universal file format according to my understanding, and most visually impaired are likely to have zoom in options on their computer.

I don't think I'll ever be able to reach everyone with all formats, not unless I become really popular.

But hopefully this covers as many bases as I can cover given my own limitations.

As an artist and a creative person, I think everybody should take pride in coming up with innovative ideas to cater to the less-fortunate. It should be a challenge and as artists, we shouldn't shy away from them.

yes I agree 100%.

[McDuffies]

My theory is that as a child, Robby was molested by a blind guy. That's the only reason I can come up with for all the hostility he's showing.

Close enough, he was molested by me and I'm near-sighted. The image of my jar-bottom glasses carved into his brain forever.

[Killbert-Robby]

My theory is that as a child, Robby was molested by a blind guy. That's the only reason I can come up with for all the hostility he's showing.

Apparently "I have nothing against blind people, I just happen to think this idea, this one right here, the one that involves the comic, not blind people in general, just the comics-for-the-blind-idea, is stupid" is just too deeply intellectual for people here to grasp. I guess the only reason for all the HOSTILITY in here is that everyone was molested by someone who had a different opinion to theirs.

Considering I think I'm probably the only one here who's actually ever volunteered with the blind, I honestly don't think I have fuck all to prove, but it doesn't mean I can't get tired of this OMGROBBYHAETSDABLIND bullshit.