First and foremost, Universal Webcomics is a conversation, an endeavor to build an understanding of the comic creation processes and to create and provide easy to understand guidance on enhancing these comics to make them both more accessible, via the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), and capable of supporting multiple languages (internationalization).
Since I was a child, I’ve had a love of comics. Daily, I would dig through the newspaper for the “funny pages”; this naturally progressed to reading comics on the internet. Much, much later, during my career as a web developer, I was introduced to the world of web accessibility and became an impassioned advocate for it. At some point it occurred to me - as much as I enjoy comics, they are primarily a visual medium and are unintentionally locking out blind and vision-impaired readers. Thanks to the knowledge I’ve gained developing accessible solutions on the web, I understand that they don’t need to be excluded and, at its most basic level, it’s not even that hard to implement!
Building off of this idea, I was curious who else might not be able to enjoy webcomics the way I did. This led me to the topic of internationalization. While I personally benefit from the dominance of English in the digital world, both as a consumer and a creator, others do not. Along with gaining knowledge to develop accessible solutions, I’ve also had some practice creating internationalized experiences, though this poses its own unique challenges in a visual medium.
Ultimately, I’m hopeful that this project will provide guidance on the means to open up this world to both groups of users. If absolutely anyone is able to access a new world as a result of this project, I will consider it a success.
While the central goal of Universal Webcomics is one of making webcomics “universally” accessible, it’s targeting two specific areas to do so - accessibility and internationalization. While there are significant, if not obvious, ways in which these two areas overlap, they are different enough to warrant tackling them separately, in two phases. The first phase, amusingly titled “ComicA11y”, will focus on addressing accessibility, and the second phase, which is currently lacking an amusing name, will focus on addressing internationalization.
Before I get more into the specific phases, I want to go back to my opening line, “first and foremost, Universal Webcomics is a conversation.” To that end, I’ve created a newsletter to facilitate the conversation. Even if you’re only passively interested, I encourage you to take a moment to sign up! I chose the format of a newsletter because I wanted to keep the discussion focused, and I wanted to maintain a modicum of privacy for everyone involved. To keep it from being one-sided, however, you will be able to respond to the newsletters to e-mail me questions or comments. I’ll do my best to incorporate these in subsequent newsletters, in some cases as a redirection of the question for more thoughts and feedback and, in other cases, to discuss or provide an answer. While I’m hoping to start putting together at least some examples immediately, if this discussion is successful, I’m hopeful it will grow and inspire additional examples that further push the limits or don’t otherwise fit the “basic mold”.
I can’t stress enough that the biggest way you can help is to sign up for the newsletter and start taking part in the conversation! Ask/answer questions! Share your thoughts!
If you’re familiar with GitHub issues (or are curious), you can file and view them here.
One particular area that creators could help would be in granting permission to use their work in examples, particularly if they think it presents a unique case that’s not been addressed. Links and credit will always be given.
Forward newsletters, share the website with others, and use the hashtag #ComicA11y on social media!
The initial phase of this project is focused on what’s called “accessibility”. To appreciate the phase name, “ComicA11y”, it helps to understand the word “a11y”, pronounced like the word it looks like, “ally”, is the numeronym for “accessibility”. People who work in computer accessibility like to think of themselves as allies to the disabled, and work to ensure technology is usable by them, ideally by bringing the experience up to the same level of quality and pizazz as other users (and not vice-versa). It’s also worth nothing that a side-effect of improving the accessibility for people suffering from vision impairment is that you’re also improving machine indexing, archiving, and searchability of your website.
The second phase of this project is focused on what’s called “internationalization”, which has the numeronym “I18n”. Currently this phase doesn’t have a clever name, but fingers crossed that we’ll think of something by the time it’s ready to get started!.
Internationalization will be built on top of the accessibility layer, harnessing and adapting that functionality. Given that most creators aren’t natively familiar with multiple languages, this effort will likely require some degree of user contribution, where as for accessibility this could be optional.
To kivi, from the web-a11y slack channel, for suggesting the name “Universal Webcomics”. It seems to have been the closest example of a simple name that encompasses both of the primary end goals of the project (accessibility & internationalization).
To jasonday, from the web-a11y slack channel, for suggesting the name “Comica11y”; while it lacked the necessary reference to the internationalization aspects of the project, it’s an amusing name that seems fitting for that phase.
To the many, many creators of all the wonderful webcomics I’ve enjoyed over the years.