New Comics for the Blind Project

Several years back, I talked a bit about how Philipp Meyer created a comic for blind people. One of the interesting insights he brought up was that only about 10% of blind people can read braille, so he wanted to make a comic that didn't require knowing how to read braille in order to read the story. When I first heard about it, I wondered whether the tradtional panel distinctions could/would be read properly by a blind person -- since those are historically a means of VISUALLY separating distinct portions of a comic -- but I can't seem to find any follow-up information on the project.

However, an unrelated project showed up on Kickstarter recently. Einar Petersen is looking to 'translate' his comic, Implant!, into a version that's accessible by the blind and seeing-impaired. He's essentially taking the existing art, raising and lowering the linework relative to the page surface, and 3-D printing it. Now, he's also converting the dialogue into braille, so it will still have that limitation on needing to be fluent in braille into order to read his comic, but there are so few people even attempting to make blind-accessible comics, I wanted to throw a little attention Petersen's way. Even though he's already more than surpassed his modest financial goal. I'm all for more experimentation like this!

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