Today I finally set up a system for linking a transcript of the comic via an aria-describedby attribute on the comic’s image tag. As I learned, making a transcript is a time-consuming process. So far, only the most recent comic has a transcript, and it took me well over a half hour to do with little outside distraction. I can understand, then, one major barrier to accessibility being more common on the Internet: laziness.

It’s easy enough for me to consider that my comic has a very small cross-section of people that it’s targeting: web designers and developers. Of that demographic, even less have accessibility issues significant enough to prohibit them from enjoying the comic (or in some cases like deafness, the comic doesn’t have any feature that they’d be missing out on without added support). But the fact is, if even one person is interested in my work, and they can’t experience it because of a barrier that I should be trying to help overcome, then I’m doing something wrong.

Over the next few days or weeks (depending on how much free time I have for the project) I’ll continue to make transcripts for the past comics. All future CSSquirrel comics going forward will have a transcript created when it is first made.

If you’re a person who makes use of screen readers, can you take a chance to examine comic #34 (Squirrel in the Dark) and tell me if the feature is working correctly, or if there’s any other work I should make to enhance it? I’d appreciate that very much.