Making visual comics screen-readable with transcriptions (CIB21 Satellite)

Introduction

Fellow comic artists, let’s transcribe our comics together! On the Friday before the comics festival “Comic Invasion Berlin“, in the accompanying program, CIB21 Satellites, I offer an online workshop for fellow comic artists who want to collaborate on creating text-only versions of their online comics to make them more accessible. Screen-readable text-only versions accompany visual versions of my comics to make them accessibly to comics for blind people and everybody else that uses screen-readers to surf the web. This workshop especially invites artists of comics communicating activism from and for marginalized communities. As a queer and non-binary trans comic artist, communication is very close to my heart.

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Transcribing Screenreadable Comics

Introduction

I want my comics to be accessible not only visually, but also tactile and acoustic. Therefore I need a transcription into pure text. Visual elements of the comics have to be described and the pixelated text from the comics image file is typed out. This text is machine-readable. Readers can access it with text-to-speech systems and braille display.

Wanting to make make my comics accessible beyond the visual has a lot to do with my own audience. I wrote about this in my first blog post on screenreadable comics, which includes a list of all the comics already transcribed.

The first workshop “Transcribing Screenreadable Comics” was offered to comic artists in September 2020. The workshop covered three objectives of transcribing comics. Firstly, the comic should gain accessibility for more readers. Secondly, the transcription enables text search and googleability. Thirdly, making comic transcriptions can be a tool of analyzing and getting to know ones own work.

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Screen Readable Comics

Why do they need to be screenreadable?

Pixilated online comic are not accessible to everybody. A screen reader is unable to read out text from image files in .jpg format. A screen reader is a tool that converts text and HTML structures into a form accessible for readers using a speech synthesizer or a braille display. The output is acoustic or tactile. People that surf my website with speech synthesizer or braille display would not have access to the comics. How can I change that?

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Article : sketches and notes hosted here first

I want more control over my data, therefore I will first publish #immerzeichnen Sketches and part of my tweets and facebook updates here.

Starting this week, this website got its own sketchbook: www.annaheger.de/immerzeichnen. Posting excerpts from my sketchbook and from work in progress projects motivates me to keep going and to sketch regularly. I created the hashtag #immerzeichen to tie these posts together and enable my followers to mute the stream of visual input if necessary.

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Article : Genderneutral Pronouns

Here an overview of genderneutral pronouns in English, you can find a description of German gender neutral pronouns on the Pronouns Page.

Each alternative is tested with the following example sentence: “The reader comments the post. He himself leaves a link to his blog”.

Invented Pronouns

“The reader comments the post. Zie hirself leaves a link to hir blog.”

“The reader comments the post. Per perself leaves a link to per blog.”

Using the singular they

“The reader comments the post. They themselves leaves a link to their blog.”

Existing Slang Words

“The reader comments the post. Yo leaves a link.” Grammar Girl

Übersichtsseite “A General & Specific Discussion of Gender-Neutral Alternatives to Gendered Pronouns, Including Answers to Frequently Asked Questions” GENDER-NEUTRAL PRONOUN FAQ