Accessible Comics Resources to Help with FXL work

Hello!

Apologies for the lateness of this email. It is deadline season at 
NNELS, so I have been busy ensuring we meet all the deadlines for the 
projects I am supervising.

As promised last FXL meeting here are some links and resources around 
creating accessible comics that could aid us in our current work.

Here is a link to my paper I cowrote with Leah Brochu: 
https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/ijidi/article/view/32405 
<https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/ijidi/article/view/32405>

Our work was based on the creating DAISY books from a doc file, as per 
the NNELS workflow at the time of writing the paper. NNELS now produces 
reflowable EPUB3's. There are a few links in our resources and worked 
cited that talk about describing digital comics for people with print 
disabilities, including some very interesting discussions from blind 
readers from Blind Panels Podcast. Comic Scripts were brought up in the 
meeting, and they are super useful as guidelines to how to describe and 
what to describe. Some authors create very rich scripts (Neil Gaimen is 
one) while other authors create very sparse scripts that are just 
general guidelines for what they want in the panel. There is an online 
comic script archive here: https://www.comicsexperience.com/scripts/ 
<https://www.comicsexperience.com/scripts/>

This all comes down to who will be authoring this work, which we all 
know is labor intensive. I agree with what was said in our last meeting 
about reading systems filing in the gap. Creators don't necessarily want 
to take this one, because it is new and seems overwhelming. I bump 
against this all the time in my work at NNELS as we try to teach 
publishers to take ownership of accessibility and empower both the 
publisher and the author. I am hoping with the teams work on the FXL 
documentation more publishers and authors will be willing to take this 
on. I also mentioned there is a lot of work that is being down by 
authors of web comics. One of the resources in my paper is a conference 
panel that discusses how writers can make their online comics more 
accessible, not really what we are doing, but good to learn about for 
inspiration and to see how others are tackling this. I think it is 
important to have people who read and understand comic book language to 
be helping put in the work for how to make them accessible, and all my 
research comes from either creators and readers with print disabilities, 
or comic book artists who helped build the genre.

Here is a link to our in house documentation for how to create a comic 
book reader: 
https://bclc.wiki.libraries.coop/doku.php?id=public:nnels:etext:comics 
<https://bclc.wiki.libraries.coop/doku.php?id=public:nnels:etext:comics>

The wiki breaks down our process step-by-step on how we organize a 
reader and describe each part of a comic. What we did was create a text 
version of the comic, that is independent from the image so it can be 
navigational, since Alt-text is not navigational. This guidelines are 
for creating a DAISY version of the comic and for reformatting. Creation 
of a comic from the bottom up would look a bit different. This work was 
done a few years ago when I was still fairly new to the industry and has 
been put on hold, but I want to readdress how we actually use the 
images, and figure out what to put in the Alt-text. The issue is that if 
the page is one image with multiple panels, alt-text alone could be a 
bit of a nightmare, because you can't navigate easily within the image 
description and it may be too much information leading to cognitive 
overload. Something we have already covered in our meetings.

Here is a link to an article I found about someone who drafted a spec 
for XML for comics (it is not what we are doing, but could spark some 
inspiration maybe?): http://comicsml.jmac.org/about.html 
<http://comicsml.jmac.org/about.html>

This is the presentation I mentioned on Adapting Comics for the blind: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQ94byTwat0 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQ94byTwat0>

For samples, I have two finished titles, and two partially finished 
titles I could share parts with the group. We have the original we did 
back in 2017 for The Walking Dead Vol 01 (which I am afraid to 
personally look at because I know it could be better.) This one was 
created in DAISY format, and I could share the XML documents of some 
sample pages along with the doc file we created to make the DAISY 
version. And we have a shorter children's comic we did in EPUB3, which I 
can create a EPUB3 of the sample pages for this sample. Would that work 
for the group? I am not sure how helpful this would be for FXL, as it is 
a different workflow. I am very happy to share samples as requested. Let 
me know!

As Always,

Rachel

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQ94byTwat0>

-- 
she/her
Production Coordinator
National Network for Equitable Library Service (NNELS)
rachel.osolen@bc.libaries.coop