After two years of convening conversations about how to make comics accessible for blind and low vision readers, we decided it was time to try it ourselves! This page provides access materials and annotations that accompany the print comic “Comics Beyond Sight: A Highly Visual Case for Blind Access,” by Nick Sousanis and Emily Beitiks which appeared in MIT Technology Review’s June 2023 issue (See their interactive version here). LISTEN to the Audio version of the comic here.

This Audio Comic features Emily and Nick introducing the comic, describing the imagery and reading the text, along with additional voice actors and other elements. (If trouble accessing Audio Comic, can also listen here.) The accompanying audio transcription is here.

To read the panel by panel alt-text in a plain text document, visit here. Or, for a PDF alt-text tagged version of the comic, please click here.

UPDATE!! Comics Beyond Sight has WON the 2024 Comics Studies Society Gilbert Seldes Prize for Public Scholarship! We are pleased and grateful this recognition and show of support for the work, and hope it continues to bring attention to the importance of making comics accessible! Thank you.

a two page very dense comic in black and white about accessibility - so the lack of accessible alt-text is a bit annoying - but we made a whole audio comic and alt-text for the print edition that I'll put up here, so all that will be accessible as I continue to flesh out this page

Emily & Nick’s in-depth annotation of the comic can be found here.

The comic again in two separate pages instead of the spread:

Additionally, I (Nick) made up a whole not-Batman comic featuring Blackout versus the Bad Ideas Gang to use as the examples we investigated within the comic. I had more of that in mind, but for time, I didn’t get as much of it made as intended, but you can see the cover (homage to Amazing Fantasy #15 featuring first appearance of Spider-Man), the two interior pages, and a headshot back cover.

Alt text descriptions for the bonus Blackout materials here.

Looking to share the QR code from the comic that leads to this page – it’s here:

this is a QR code - black and white, fragmented abstract pattern Thank you to Art Beyond Sight for supporting our title derived from their work. Thanks to our cameo voice actors Cheryl Green, Matthew Alaniz, Ajani  Murray, and Thomas Reid. Thank you to Shaina Ghuraya for serving as audio producer for this project. Thank you to Stanley Yarnell and Cathy Kudlick for sharing your blind expertise with us. A big thank you to Yue-Ting Siu, our former colleague and collaborator, and lastly to everyone else who presented at, or participated in, one of our programs from the Accessible Comics Collective, where we have learned so much. Thanks to Mat Honan for the invitation, and Allison Arieff and Stephanie Arnett for shepherding the work at MIT Tech Review!