The Messy Work of Making a Visual Medium Accessible: Tactics for Audio Describing Unflattening

Comic Studies & the Longmore Institute on Disability at San Francisco State University hosted this program on February 21, 2024 as part of their work with the Accessible Comics Collective:
Join us as we take a sample of Nick Sousanis’s ground-breaking comic Unflattening and explore three different descriptive strategies for blind/low vision readers. Access experts and blind end-users Georgina Kleege, Joshua Miele, and Silvana Rainey join Sousanis to consider the strengths and challenges of each version.
This conversation addressed what visuals can be rendered through words and what can get lost in the translation? To engage the blind listener, how far from the original art form can description stray while still honoring the artist's work? And why it’s so important - with even the most visually complex work - to tackle innovative forms of access. With its lack of narrative and highly intentional use of the visual form to make meaning, Unflattening poses a particularly difficult challenge for audio description, and we believe, revealed new opportunities and conversations for this nascent field of access. If this can be done, all comics can!
As we "learn out loud"* together, this session aimed to encourage more artists and audio describers to embrace the artful practice of making accessible comic projects.
With support from IDC and SFSU Liberal and Creative Arts.
Please check out the three audio description samples in advance to get the most out of this conversation (audio and written transcripts as well as the source material available here: drive.google.com/drive/folder....