events/2025-07-17-front-end-study-hall

Front End Study Hall #032 was an IndieWeb meetup on Zoom held on 2025-07-17.

• Archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/2025-07-17-front-end-study-hall

Front End Study Hall #032

July 17, 2025

Participants

• benji
• Joe Crawford
• Tantek Çelik
• Thomas Vander Wal
• Mike Kupietz
• Emily

Joe's Background

Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics is a classic book, Joe's background is a few panels from the book

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Comics & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinventing_Comics
  • https://www.scottmccloud.com

Comics and accessibility

• https://lab.artlung.com/comics-a11y/ - Joe Crawford takes a stab at markup for description
• aria-describedby to point to a definiton list
• questions? how does it read to a screen reader?
• is there a way to spit a chunk of html into a tool and get out how it reads to a screen reader?
• JAWS, VoiceOver

Tantek sharing. - object tag which gives you flexibility about markup

• if the browser can display the object data, it does, otherwise it displays the contents inside the object
• https://tantek.com/2013/149/b1/bayesian

• Tables? WASP / Adobe? Accessible tables
• Other rich content
  • REaltime interfaces
  • Linecharts of time?
  • Nonlinear content or content that can be read in multiple ways across multiple axes
• Section 508 - us regulations around accessilbilty

• https://veroniiiica.com/how-to-write-alt-text-digital-comics/

• Content of each panel? How do you build each comic? Alt attributes?
• Alt attribute as "punchline" or "aside" is not a best practice for a11y
• https://xkcd.fyi/ - provides captions

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_(2024_film) based on experimental nonlinear comic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_(comics)

• Layout of print?
• Plain text presentation
• Spectrum of layout?
• Comics layout is part of the art itself?
• New tools to creators? What responsilbility do creators have to make their work accessible?

• XKCD - "Click And Drag" - the "largest comics panel ever" - https://xkcd.com/1110/
• infinite canvas idea from Scott McCloud's book on the future of comics

• motion comics as an alternative view of a comic originally printed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_comic

readers vs creators, users vs authors, for the web, note priority of constituencies from the TAG: https://www.w3.org/TR/design-principles/#priority-of-constituencies

• equivalent but not identical experience as a11y

• Berg London's project with Warren Ellis to create a comic book story that is augmented by black light, without the black light part of the story is lost - https://berglondon.com/blog/tag/svk/

• Ted Nelsons Xanadu does a whooshing experience
  • https://www.xanadu.net
• We can create similar experiences with page transitions
• experience of the creator / experience of the user

...

analogy of VCR for customizing viewing of broadcasts (time shifting, pause / rewind / FF etc.), ads, analogy to the web, pages with ads / ad blockers, recipe sites with long stories and users choosing to block or skip all that

• user preferences matter
• technology empowers users to customize their experience
• user choice is to some extent inevitable
• low motion, cognitive differences, correct to design in sympathy for the great diversity of humans

• what is correct?
  • ethics, practically, how much is the "correct amount"

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/Status/415

• Third Voice controversy

image analysis by AI for providing text description

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8wcbJR9IaU Discriminative AI to describe images

• “I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies,” writes Douglas Adams in The Salmon of Doubt.

1. "Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works."
2. "Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it."
3. "Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things."

• related to AI generated alt text: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11448

• AU was an HTML3 element for the Author Name: https://microformats.org/wiki/html3

• https://web.archive.org/web/19990220223439im_/http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/coffee.html uses an invalid tag AUTHOR around an email address - a special tag akin to cite or source could be used to provide attribution to ai
• but also adding a prefix to ai generated descriptions prior to that description would assisst the user in context

<!doctype html>

<html lang="en-US">

https://codepen.io/benjifs/pen/VYvvdJv https://lucybellwood.com/hourly-comic-day-2022/