We've had two winners for the writing competition for a blind or visually impaired comic book writer. What is your future outlook for blind comic book writers, and why do you think that way? That's the comic book experience I have, that everyone has, and that is the experience that's inaccessible to so many people. And you go page by page, and you go down each page from one panel to another, following the story, reading the speech bubbles, the captions, and so on. There's only one voice: the voice in your head. How did you decide to have panel descriptions and a single narrator? On Motherboard: 'A Blind Legend' Uses Binaural Audio to Create a Game for the Visually Impaired We did a little poll after releasing Audio Comics, and it turned out that though people like both types, there was a large preference to the comic book experience rather than the movie experience. We give the comic book experience, rather than a movie experience, going page by page, panel by panel, to give you the entire experience of reading a comic book in a way that keeps your interest going, start to finish. They have great productions with a big cast and music and they create, as they say, "a movie in your head." Comics Empower, on the other hand, creates comic books with one actor per comic, and no music. Having said that, Comics Empower does create a lot of audio productions for comics, and we do it differently from Graphic Audio or Audio Comics. We're a comic book store, not a comic book publisher-so anyone who creates great comic books can be sold at Comics Empower. We actually sell Audio Comics productions at Comics Empower, and I hope that Graphic Audio will allow us to sell its comics as well. What's the difference between those and, say, Audio Comics or Graphic Audio adaptations? By accident, it turned out to be one of the most important things I've done in my life.Ĭomics Empower has created its own in-house audio adaptations of comic books. There are literally tens of thousands of kids, teens, and adults out there who would love to read the same comic books their sighted friends are reading and to talk to them about it, without waiting for the friends or family to read the comics to them. But once I had figured out how to do it, it was just a crime not to do it. There was no real reason for me to think of it. No, and there was no one blind or visually impaired in my family or friends at the time who could have triggered this thought. Once people reacted well to them, we were off to the races.īut you're not blind or visually impaired, right? In a month and a half, the website was up with a few comic books, just to see if they were done right. I was running an indie comic book company called New Worlds Comics for a year and a half, when suddenly a thought came to me: Why are there no comics for the blind? And then I figured out how to do it, how to translate everything to audio, how to build the website, how to create the store, and so on. How did you come up with the idea of making a comic store for the blind? Three years later, I was in high school, and I'd go to the used comic book store two minutes away from the school at the end of every day, where I would pick up some kind of old, cheap comic book with my lunch money. When I got to the United States at age 11, the first thing I bought was a Spider-Man comic book. I don't remember the other's name, but it was kind of a Tarzan rip-off, with adventures in Africa. We just had two comics, which were both in black-and-white. We didn't really have any comics-not Spider-Man, not Superman. VICE: Tell me about how you got into comics. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. I reached out to Hasson to ask him about why he created the store and what he envisions as the future of comics for the blind. On the contrary, sighted people who visit the store will need to use adaptive tools and techniques to navigate or ask a visually impaired person for assistance. The store is completely accessible to the blind or visually impaired using a high-contrast display or a screen reader. The Comics Empower website was designed to put blind and visually impaired customers first by providing original and adapted audio comics produced in-house, plus audio comics produced by other companies.
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