Re: Blind Users and Web Comics

At 02:52 PM 1/9/02, Kynn Bartlett wrote:
>So, therefore, I'm curious in hearing what blind users think about
>the idea of using web accessibility techniques to make web comic
>strips and comic books more accessible to users with disabilities.
>Would you "rather just read a book"?

As a blind person I would say it is definitely worth doing, & I will 
happily throw a brick at anyone who says it isn't!

I have always enjoyed the descriptions of comics that my friends have done 
for me, & it would be great to have some form of this on the Web (done 
preferably by the author). I remember being particularly frustrated by a 
Krazy Kat page a couple years ago that had great biographical info on 
George Herriman & discussed the social commentary in his strips, but didn't 
contain any description of the scanned comics themselves. (I guess it would 
be hard to get the author's longdescs in this case, but somebody could 
still do it.)

I would say there is a sliding scale from graphic-novel-type art comics 
(that would indeed be difficult to describe adequately) to things like 
political cartoons (where the point isn't so much the image itself as the 
political point that it makes, which can be stated pretty well with 
words).  Clearly the pure text version does not replace the original work, 
just as a book of art criticism does not rplace the works it discusses. But 
this still doesn't prevent people from describing paintings in works of art 
criticism. So also it shouldn't stop the creation of this text parallel for 
comics.

Feel free to fwd,

Patrick

Received on Wednesday, 9 January 2002 18:49:02 UTC