opening comments and keynote panel image event flyer the program in visual impairments comic studies and the longmore institute on disability presents adapting comics for blind and low vision readers one day virtual symposium thursday august 12th 9 a.m to 4 p.m pacific time how can a visual medium be made accessible featuring four panels with experts in access blindness and comics exploring creative and technological approaches to open up this historically visual medium to blind and low vision readers audio descriptions [Music] emerging technologies depictions of blindness in comics join us to see what new possibilities emerge from the conversation registration https colon slash tinyurl.com adapting comics a d slash asl slash c a rt provided for other requests email b i t i k s sfsu.edu
supported by college of liberal and creative arts presenting sponsor amazon introductory remarks nick susannas uting sioux emily baytix panelists gina gagliano matthew schifrin all right let's begin thank you all for joining us this morning or afternoon or evening depending on where you're you're joining from in the world we are so excited to see so many people registered and to continue the conversation that we began a few months ago my name is emily badex i am the associate director at the longmore institute on disability and a quick audio description of myself i am a white woman in my 30s with some dangly earrings and some real frizzy curly hair i'm now noticing um just a few logistics notes to get us kicked off today uh we have the chat turned off except for you know we'll use it for a few pertinent information that the the host will be wanting to share with you all but otherwise we have that turned off as it's just not that accessible of a space however we invite you to uh use the caption i mean use the q a space just as if it is a um as if it is a chat room uh you can pose questions there we will have time for q a and all of our panels but also just use it to share who you are get to know your other uh other folks um in addition um we have a we have captions and if you want to use them on zoom that's great but we know sometimes people like to personalize them make them a little bigger so if you prefer that you can access them at tinyurl.com longmorecaptions and we have one other option for today for a little bit more collaboration we want today to just be the start of the conversation uh and and and hopefully make a lot of other options for people to get to know each other and work and collaborate on this topic we know that many of our participants are who are not going to be able to be panelists today still have incredible expertise on this topic that we we want to hear from and and we want you to share so again you can chime into the q a but we also have a facebook group that's set up and we hope that will be a space where things can continue to um percolate and you can access that at facebook.com groups slash comics a one one y so we hope to see you there uh in in the many days to come after this event um just a quick word about the longmore institute we are very happy to be one of the co-organizers of this event today um with comic studies vision impairments and thank you to our span sponsor amazon specifically the disability uh chapter uh the disability employment resource group at amazon we we really appreciate the support um the longmore institute is all about doing things that uh really shift perceptions of how we see and understand disability and uh that often is focused on representations and it often has been about thinking through the way we talk about access in ways that are going beyond compliance really just trying to get people excited about all that access can be that it can be this creative art form and i know that that will be a thread that will be really woven throughout all of our conversations today so we are looking forward to learning and i'm very grateful to be here supporting this uh this today just want to give one quick shout out to thank our student assistant from longmore nathan burns who is helping today behind the scenes if you are having any tech problems you can uh raise your tech questions in the q a or you can send an email to us at the longmore institute at p k l i n s t at sfsu.edu so we will try to make sure you're comfortable and set up and don't hesitate to reach out for help if you need it with that i will pass it to my colleague nick take it away nick thanks emily um thank you all for being here i'm nick suzannis i'm a white male um with glasses and a batman t-shirt under my sweatshirt and uh in a slightly cluttered room um i'm the professor of comic studies with a comic studies minor at san francisco state and i'm a maker of comics um so i'm gonna just talk a little bit about the inception of of this how we came to be here and um so i i did my dissertation as a comic book i drew it and wrote it all and it's published as a book on flattening and i teach i run this comics program and in both those roles i've been very concerned with access how do i how do i make education and scholarly ideas accessible but i was aware at the time even as doing my dissertation that that i was leaving some audiences out um and specifically i i my metaphor for my work was very much about about the visual system and um and so as whereas as much as i was bringing people into the conversation it's very much leaving them out um and so it felt like a big challenge to me and as i was working on my dissertation i would collect links that i would see about comics for blind and low vision readers i remember encountering shape reader that we'll hear about later today i've been dropping that into my file and i would just keep collecting things and thinking what do i do and when i came to san francisco state i was hired at the same time as king you'll hear from in a minute and was really excited we struck up a great conversation and she came and visited my visual communication class a few times and we kept talking about this and then this past year i have some master's students that are um they're doing their work in comics and the question about how could that work be made accessible came up um and and rather than seeing it as a burden for them i thought this is a this is a real opportunity you know there's an opportunity for us to maybe maybe lead the way on it um and and think about an industry that has just very little standards or very little anything going on around comics and accessibility so uh san francisco state had an internal grant king and i started talking about it uh we brought in emily and i've been so blessed to learn from the two of them um and we planned a first event back in march that was supposed to be internal just to talk about and learn about ways that we could think about this question um the week before we said well let's let's invite the public we'll put it on social media and uh 800 people later we had quite a response and we were so overwhelmed by that we felt like we had to keep building on that conversation so we've been sort of sprinting to make today happen and we're just uh so grateful for all the people who are speaking we have a terrific terrific group of people to speak today and all of you who are attending who probably have so much more to contribute to this conversation so i just want to say thank you for coming and i'm really excited to learn from you all and see how we can keep expanding what comics can do and who they can be for thank you hi everybody um i'm ting soo and as nick mentioned i'm also faculty at san francisco state i coordinate the program the teaching program in visual impairments um which is is a fancy way of saying i train teachers to work with blind and low vision students um so people who might be familiar with this work or unfamiliar with this work teachers who work with blind and low vision students are typically referred to as tvis or teacher of visually impaired students so in my role as an educator in the space i've been in the field teaching actively for about 18 years now heading into my i think 18th year of teaching um so my challenge is always ensuring access for my students um so my goal is always for my my dream is for my students to be able to walk into their classroom and not have to encounter barriers to information in the room or barriers to their learning that they can just sit and collaborate with their peers and design and create information for themselves and essentially be in an empowered situation in classroom communities where typically our blind and low vision students are disempowered so when i met nick when we first were hired it was really exciting to meet somebody uh from an area of um you know design and art that's very visually based and to meet somebody who was interested in filling those accessibility gaps you know for today's uh symposium i'm really super excited to partner with both nick and emily and longmore institute because i feel like this is truly a meeting of communities communities from communities from visual media disability communities activism groups people who are really interested in information accessibility and building technology systems to facilitate that sort of access you know as an educator i also see my role as kind of an ongoing learning process to figure out how to be a good ally to my students and how to be a true ally to blind and low vision communities so i hope that um throughout the day today that we can all um engage in this collective practice you know if you're a typically sighted participant learning from our blind participants learning from the community learning how to be a good ally to disability communities and um figuring out our role in how to empower people who might have been more disempowered coming into this conversation i'm also very excited to learn from designers who have been in this very visual based medium and um kind of collectively brainstorm opportunities for for closing those gaps um so we um you know oh and i oh i forgot to describe myself uh i'm an asian female i'm short hair and i'm just wearing a v-neck t-shirt um and i smile a lot when i get nervous talking so um anyways i um i'm i'm proud of the work of the three of us because i feel like it was a lot of work putting this on but it was also that ongoing educational process for all of us to think of all the ways that we can amplify um voices from the disability community so one way we've tried to do that is with each panel for today and we've designed four panels um if you had a chance to look at our agenda you can see there's a description for each panel you might also notice that for each panel we've tried really hard to ensure a majority representation of people from the disability community so that there is an authentic voice to talk about what the accessibility needs really are um and so on that note i would like to introduce our opening keynote panel um we you're going to see a pre-recorded video um we needed to pre-record it first for scheduling reasons um but i know that people who are speaking this morning um they might be popping in live later and um you can also carry on you know further questions and engagement with them on the facebook group that we have for beginning and carrying on today's conversation about comics accessibility or hashtag comics a11y so in this opening keynote panel you'll see nick again we've figured out a way to clone nick and nick will be moderating a discussion um with um somebody from the publishing sector and then also somebody from the blindness sector both working towards closing that gap in accessibility and access so thank you again all for coming and sharing your day and time with us okay so i'm so i'm i'm nick susannas i'm a white male wearing glasses in a room with some books and um we're just kick off our event today we're going to have a brief conversation uh with a publisher and a blind blind reader and advocate for accessibility to sort of set the tone of why this is so important some of the challenges and really and really get the conversation going for the day um so i'm gonna let them introduce themselves and we'll take it from there how about gina go cause ice okay i can start us off i'm gina gagliano i'm a white woman with brown hair and uh rectangular glasses and i am also the publishing director of random house graphic which is a kids nya graphic novel publisher our motto is a graphic novel on every bookshelf and we just launched our line last year and i'm excited to be here today to talk about adapting comics for blind and low vision readers matt over to you so i'm matthew schifrin a guy of average height in his late early 20s and i am a comic book accessibility advocate and do a lot of kind of audio book creation and basically making sure that blind people can have access to comic books thank you both matt do you want to do you want to set us off and tell how you came to this sure so my comic book adventures started when i was four or five and i was really interested in who spider-man was and everyone was talking about this guy who could climb walls and i had no idea who he was i'd never seen a movie about him i asked my dad whether my dad could kind of tell me about him and dad brought home a comic book and he read it to me and it was just an amazing experience because i'd never i'd never read a comic book and mind you my dad's from the soviet union there were no comic books in russia and so we were kind of bumbling our way through this comic book together it was like in the middle of a story arc trying to figure out who these characters were and what they were doing and it was just an amazing experience because it was there was so much accent happening and we were like in the middle of brian michael bendis spiderman around in the early 2000s and like spiders getting thrown out of windows and like flying through the air and he's barely conscious and all this action stuff is happening and i am over the moon because i'm understanding every single thing that's happening because dad is doing the describing and as i get older my friends get more and more into comic books and they're reading them and talking about them and i can't access them because there's no way to scan them no pictures no way to make the pictures tactile and so i'm kind of stuck i'm in limbo and one day i'm on the internet and i think to myself you know these writers they're not improvisers they must have scripts that they go off of so i google comic book script and i find the comic book script archive which is a online resource of all these different scripts that writers have written so the artists know what to draw and that is my ticket in i think yes i found these scripts i found these authors now if i can get in touch with the authors and get access to the rest of their scripts then blind people can access these comic books that cited people have been reading and enjoying for years so i start going to comic book conventions and talking to authors and it's amazing because these authors are so so receptive they're so thrilled and energized by this idea of blind people who've never been able to read a comic book suddenly being able to do it and they're extremely gracious and they give me access to these scripts and then from these scripts not only am i able to experience these comic books myself but i'm able to give that experience to other blind comic book readers by creating audio adaptations that's great matt thank you so much um okay and i can um start off myself talking about how i first came into thinking about comics for blind or low vision readers which is at working in publishing it became part of my job to deal with college course adoption requests so i would get emails from different people at colleges professors administrators who had a blind student in a class that was reading a comic book to ask what can we give people and this was always a little bit of a puzzle because the the part of the graphic novel industry that i work in is a lot of um a lot of very personal stories um less you know spider-man uh web slinging over buildings and more you know people people talking and sometimes having adventures but more more emotional stories more working with a single person who both writes and draws the art um so in some cases there's not necessarily a script people script by doing thumbnails in some cases there is a script but it's kind of a first draft where you know the author will take that and you know i recently had a situation where the author did all the pencils and we looked at them and were like oh yeah we need to add another emotional moment here into the story because kind of seeing this drawn out we're realizing that this isn't just quite hitting that emotional beat that we want um so you know in that case with that book if we went back and provided the initial script to a college for of course the reader of that that script would be missing a chunk of the book um so kind of working in this this way of provide just providing scripts to people didn't seem like it it fulfilled the ultimate of could readers have an experience that was equivalent to reader readers looking at the script have an experience that was equivalent to readers who were looking at the graphic novel with both text and art in them and i think something else that that is interesting here is also just that i think i think i'm i'm i think it's accurate to say the only time in my career that i would get these requests was literally from college classes and it wasn't i i have never kind of gotten a direct request from someone who's just a general member of the public um you know someone who themselves is is blind or low vision and i you know have this question of if there are so many requests that i do get from colleges you know how are how are comics publishers and comics in general working to be accessible to readers outside that space you know and in prose books of course there's audio books um and that's that's kind of a space that comics is just entering into but it does seem it does seem like we have a strange and peculiar industry in which there's there's only a small subset of the graphic novels that exist that have been adapted to audio that are accessible at all to blind readers at this point yeah i might jump in for one second i think that's just such a strong point gina and and one of the interests i mean you know i i'm i don't make comics for blind readers but as i as a teacher and a maker i started thinking about you know the the people i'm leaving out a lot and i started compiling all these resources on what was out there and just really stunned at how little there is there's there's there's little uh you know and there's no sort of standard for it that exists um so maybe maybe we can speak a little bit of that sort of as the advocate matt and and as the publisher you know trying to trying to move in that direction i mean from an advocacy standpoint i think part of the situation is that even when we have writers who are working with artists on scripts there is really no set method of scripting some people are going to give you very specific layouts and explanations of why this panel is here and that one is there while other people are just going to kind of clump everything together and they might give you narration and they might not give you descriptions and they'll assume that the artist will kind of do a lot of the heavy lifting and create a lot of the situations that kind of give you going to give you summaries of pages as opposed to really explaining what they want and i think that from their standpoint that's like if i were an author who's working with an artist i'd probably do the same thing in a lot of cases accessibility is just something that is not considered by authors because it's it's not they're not in a position to consider because like they're they're writers they have deadlines they have a thing that's due in like a week and they they just need to get it in and i think part of the issue is that there are no there are no laws there are no standards that these things have to conform to and as a result people are just kind of doing whatever they can to get their product in on time and get it kind of out into the world in a way that sighted people can enjoy yeah i mean it is it is interesting how the the audio landscaping pros has developed pretty recently i would say over the past 10 years it's gone from kind of this very like uh very small part of the market which is like oh like on your family car trip you can listen to an audio book too this major just like almost every book that gets published in a major publisher gets an audio adaptation and i i do very much wonder if comics are are next on the boat with that um definitely there are challenges there with with audio adaptations for graphic novels because unlike pros you can't just read the script you got for all the the reasons not detailed you know all those panels where the author is like something fun will happen in the art here go to go for it or i plan to draw something awesome when i think of it more to come um you know that that's not helpful as a as an audio experience and that means the the author the audio adapters kind of have to figure out and work together how to how to bring that experience in a in a useful way that provides that description and understanding of what's going on to the the um reader who is listening rather than looking at the page um and you know i think to to get there we have to kind of look at the the motivation for doing that we have to we have to find the reasons for you know how to how do we get all the publishers on board how do we get how do we get readers on board with with audio adaptations or adaptations in other formats also that's great and i i mean i think that's why we've gathered today and why the response to the first one uh you know wanted us to do much more is is to really raise awareness you know i mean i think to matt's point there's just i think it's just not something people even it's not even on their radar for them for most people working in the industry and i think when it becomes on their radar and and you know here we have a publisher in the you know right here with us concerned about this i think things have a chance to to move so some final thoughts perhaps from youtube i mean i just wanted to thank you for the fact that when people answer when people write you emails and ask how do i make this accessible you are there you are willing to make it accessible you are working with audiobook creation teams you're really putting in the work and putting in the effort to make these kind of adapted versions be the audiobooks or script access or whatever it may be and i just wanted to thank you for really putting in the effort and making sure that uh blind people have alternative means of access to these books no matter what these means are but blind people now have them thanks to the work that you're doing and to the energy that you're kind of giving this nascent form so thank you for that well that's that's very kind of you to say i feel like i i am still so new to this space that there's there's so much more that i can be doing that publishers can be doing in general um and you know i think that looking at adapting comics for blind readers you know obviously it's it's a good thing to do right it's it's the right thing to do to make sure that all readers are are able to access this book uh these books these kinds of books and then the other the other aspect of this is the the the reason of convincing corporations right and so like matt you were talking before about how there's no laws or legal repercussions and you know that that's an interesting space also of how how how do we and corporations tackle that and the other element is i think that's in this conversation is the the market for this um which is both on the end of how how do we make these audio adaptations or other format adaptations profitable um and you know the ideal the ideal way to do that is developing audiences you know so doing more of these to the point that there there is a large audience for comics for blind readers um so that all publishers are you know joyously engaged with making audio adaptations or adaptations in other formats um because they know that the the work that they're doing is really reaching people i think that's a fantastic end point uh joyously engaged i think that's uh i think that's the work we're we're hoping to to address today and the conversations that we're looking to unfold so thank you both for setting the tone and um really looking forward to the rest of the day with everyone thank you thanks nick me too thank you i'm looking forward to learning a whole lot well thank you uh to gina and matt and matthew matt uh who will be with us on another panel live today so if you had any questions you will have an opportunity to engage with um some of the important points that matthew brought up um i think we couldn't start with a better uh commentary than than matthew's you know explanation for like why we need this and gina's uh call to action for publishers and we're very grateful to the publishers who are here today and joining us uh at this time we will now be promoting our panelists for um our next panel and transitioning to something that there was a nice teaser for in this conversation um audio description approaches and we have the wonderful thomas reed joining us as a uh as our moderator today so because we're just doing one webinar for the full day there'll be these little bumpy moments in between panels where where we're getting everybody promoted so bear with us just a minute as we get everybody in the right spot and panelists as you do become promoted go ahead and uh turn your turn your video on so you know where you're with us
2021-09-19