When I was in seventh grade, several of us took an extra-curricular class at the local community college for a semester. This particular class was on sign language, and we spent the term learning the basics of American Sign Language (ASL). I’ve never had any practical use for it, but I do remember a little, in part because the instructional book we were given was a comic. Not just a “comic” in that broad McCloudian sense of the word, but there was a legitimate, illustrated story broken down into panels over the course of 30 or 40 pages. It was about a deaf kid who starts at a new school, and how he’s able to make friends by teaching them sign language. It wasn’t a particularly good story, but it included any number of sequences in which the hand signals were drawn out in a decidedly explanatory fashion.
I know I held on to that comic for years, but I seemed to lose track of it sometime around college. At this point, I couldn’t even tell you the name of the book, much less who wrote and/or drew it. But I was pleased to recently discover a new webcomic called That Deaf Guy, a comic about a regular guy who happens to be deaf, and how he deals with a world around him which, for the most part, can hear perfectly fine.
The strip doesn’t focus on the actual signing itself, instead presenting the social issues that have to be dealt with. But from what I do remember from that class, the characters’ hands are representing actual sign language. The sign language dialogue is presented as straight text (which makes sense, since many people who do sign also speak simultaneously) so the hand gestures are not as critical to the interpretation of any given strip. But that they are shown certainly provides authenticity, particularly to anyone who might be passingly familiar with ASL. And it also keeps the strip from getting bogged down in the specific linguistics, and raises awareness with broader issues.
Several years ago, Ryan North (of Dinosaur Comics) and T. Campbell (of Penny & Aggie) launched something called Oh No Robot, intended as a search engine for webcomics. Comics, by their nature, are graphic. So when they’re presented online, they’re uploaded as graphic files, usually JPGs or GIFs. The problem with that, however, is that the graphics by themselves aren’t really searchable. There’s no easy way to find that one comic you liked with a zinger of a punchline unless you happen to also recall specifically what day it ran on. What North and Campbell sought to do, then, was to provide a way in which the text of a webcomic could be searched.
The way it works is that, after a comic is posted online, the text of the comic can be submitted separately. The two are then linked together through a database, so that a person can search on any word or phrase and any comics that have that included in the submitted text will be returned as a result. The user can then call up the comic itself to see the visuals.
What does this have to do with “differently abled comics”? Well, that searchable text also makes it possible for the visually impaired to have a screen reader read it to them. Screen readers are programs that simply sort through the text on a page, and then speak it audibly for those who can’t read it. They’re not uncommon for the blind. What this means is that, through this search functionality, Oh No Robot has also made it easier for blind people to enjoy the same comics as a sighted person might. (For the record, it was technically possible before Oh No Robot, but certainly not easy, thus making it rarely used in webcomics.) Think about how incredible that is: blind people reading the inherently visual medium of comics!
But now there’s even more available! Thanks to HTML5 and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) it’s possible to actual create a webcomic in the code itself. Instead of relying on drawing and painting programs, the code for the graphics is embedded directly within the web page, allowing the browser to understand and interpret everything in the comic. The only webcomic example I’m aware of at this point is The Bifter, a comic that’s only been running a few months and whose primary purpose, it seems, is to exploit HTML5 and SVG in the comic format.
As you can see from the graphic above, it looks pretty similar to any other comic on the web. But a quick look at the source code shows...
As you can see, it’s the content of the comic itself in text form. But instead of being submitted separately after the comic, it’s part and parcel of the comic itself. In fact, making changes to any part of the comic could be done with any simple text editor and doesn’t require an expensive graphics program like Photoshop. The downside to this approach is that, currently, HTML5 is still fairly new and doesn’t have widespread browser support yet, with Internet Explorer being the least compatible in even the most current versions. This will likely change over time, as will the development tools that will be available for it.
One of the great things I learned several years ago about online accessibility: it tends to go hand-in-hand with just plain ol’ good design. It improves both internal and external search capabilities, and tends to be more usable for “regular” visitors who just prefer different methods of exploring a site. Keeping differently abled people in mind when working on a webcomic not only expands and informs your own thought process, but tends to also improve your end results for both you and your readers!
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