Community driven comic transcription for SEO; Covinient for those blind people too
One of my daily (or as frequently as Onstad bothers) comics is Achewood. Recently links have been appearing to “Transcribe this comic”.
These are links to a new service called Oh no Robot by Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics¹ fame. It allows web comics to ask their users to transcribe their comics.
The main reasons cited are searchability on your site, and SEO rankings. Chris Onstad has previously said he doesn’t care about accessibility and historically used alt attribute for adding ‘hidden’ messages to each comic. With the advent of IE7 he has switched to a title attribute instead.
I’m going to write to Chris and Ryan and see if this new service can be used to make their highly amusing comics available to everyone. It seems like the transcriptions would be a perfect use of the longdesc attribute. This would not only help their search engine rankings but also open up their work to a whole other section of society.
¹Dinosaur Comics is the comic with the same picture of dinosaurs every time but with different text. It’s pretty funny, and actually lends itself to non-visual readers since it’s basically a conversation anyway. The picture joke is less funny after the 955th time (current comic at time of writing).
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Humour, Accessibility, Screen Readers, comics, seo
