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Innovations in Accessible Comics for Blind and Low Vision Readers! Expert panelists and participants weigh in on new projects with five international teams, as Illi and Rae reveal how we made our prize-winning queer webcomic #SeeingInBetween. Free registration is open now. Gain access to early prototypes and hear from experts like Thomas Reid, Walei Sabry, Silvana Rainey and Joshua Miele. Event starts at 10am PT (19:00 CET). Hope you can tune in! Listen, view and read the full comic.
Invitation flier for the event, in the style of a three panel comic. The text reads: 
The Program in Visual Impairments, Comic Studies & The Longmore Institute on Disability Present, Innovations in Accessible Comics for Blind and Low Vision Readers!
Highlighted in yellow: rae and illi talk shop on their comic, 10 am PT  (19:00 Uhr CET)
A jagged circle reads "Zoom Event! Friday May 5, 2023, 10am to 1:30pm." 
registration link: https://tinyurl.com/InnovationsInComics 
Get exclusive access to the projects of the Accessible Comics Collective design competition as they receive feedback from comics/access experts... and YOU!"  AD/ASL/CART provided. For other requests: beitiks@sfsu.edu. Supported by the College of Liberal and Creative Arts.
Drawings of Avatars of Rae and Illi are overlaid at bottom. Rae, on the right, is white and wears an eyepatch, pink headphones, a white shirt, yellow pants and blue shoes. Illi, on the left, is white and wears glasses, blue headphones, a yellow shirt, white skirt and pink boots. They are waving to each other and you!

Comic: Seeing InBetween

Introduction

This queer comic conversation, a collaboration between Rae Lanzerotti and Illi Anna Heger, is about seeing and being seen in between abilities, genders, and spaces. This comic is accessible in different ways: play audio or read text transcripts, and view visual images or get descriptions. All audios are prefaced by text transcript. Keep on scrolling to click through the comic elements of audio and text as you go. All visuals are matched with embedded alt text. Or listen to the complete audio version and use the complete text version of the comic at the bottom of this page.

Scroll and Click Version

The title at the top of the comic panel reads: Seeing Inbetween. Two people are hovering over the arc of the blue earth, with Europe and the USA in focus. Their names and cities are written next to them. The comic has black line-art with pink, yellow and blue coloring and gray tones. On the left, Rae Lanzerotti, from San Francisco, wears an eyepatch, pink headphones, a white shirt, yellow pants and blue shoes. On the right, Illi A. Heger, from Munich, wears glasses, blue headphones, a yellow shirt, white skirt and pink boots and looks over at Rae.

Portrait of Rae with a black eyepatch, curly hair and pink headphones. Rae says: we’re trying to tell a story about what’s important to us, what we want to understand and express about the experience of living in between in various ways

Portrait of Illi with glasses, short hair and blue headphones. Illi says: I think there’s a very precious energy in interacting artistically with another person but also communicating artistically to an audience, into the world
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We won! First we drew, and then we talked. Then we drew and talked more, building our artistic collaboration to make an accessible comic! For low vision and blind readers, we designed our multimodal comic conversation, #SeeingInBetween.All audio in the comic will also be captioned as text and all visuals image described.
Text on a multi pointed star announces: Accessible Comics Design Competition! Our two comic characters, Illi (Munich) and Rae(San Francisco), are drawn loosely, composed of squiggly black lines. We are moving toward each other and gesturing. Rae wears an eyepatch, and both Illi and Rae wear colorful headphones. We float against a bright yellow background above a blue arc of earth. Dots and lines emerge from the headphones to show our connection in space and time. A banner at the top includes portions of black line graphics from the competition announcement, with the following text: Program in Visual Impairments, Comic Studies, The Longmore Institute on Disability.

Virtual US Tour 2022: Pronouns like xier

Background of the Tour

Digital Fineliner-Drawing, black on white with a little color. Framed title: Virtual US Lecture Tour. Illi with a pink tank-top, short hair and grey rimmed glasses stands in front of a laptop. In the back a map of the USA. Below the hashtag #PronomenWieXier. My virtual US lecture tour started in April 2022, in German and/or English depending on the audience. I am invited to talk about #PronomenWieXier in different institutions of higher education in the US. I will speak about #PronomenWieXier, German as a highly gendered languagen and languange change. Continue reading

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Fresh of the press at Wallstein: “Child Emigration from Frankfurt am Main – Stories of rescue, loss and memory” with essays, documentation and almost 50 pages comic biographies. I wrote and drew one of the biographies and worked together with the team of Deutschen Exilarchiv 1933-1945, and used there research for the corresponding exhibition at Deutsches Nationalmuseum. The other Comics were created by Hamed Eshrat, Magdalena Kaszuba, Sascha Hommer, Birgit Weyhe and Ilki Kocer. The essays treat the history of Kindertransport out of Germany and the memorial called Waisen-Karussel. The book contains biographical info and objects from the live of the portrayed children. The book is in English and German. Part of the front cover of the book. Coal drawing of a steam propelled train is going through a snow covered countryside. Text: 
Kinderemigartion aus Frankfurt am Main
Child Emigration from Frankfurt am Main
WallsteinPhoto of part of a page from the book. White drawings on dark green background with magenta colored accents, black text in white speech bubbles is not legible.Photo of part of a page taken at an angle. A white sketch on maroon background shows panels of a comic that are numbered. Below text: English translation.
Panel 1.1 Lili got accepted! She's going to Malmö!
Panel 1.2 Malmö in January!
Panel 1.3 Aren't you feeling well, Lili?...
The text is cut off

Making visual comics screen-readable with transcriptions (CIB21 Satellite)

Introduction

Fellow comic artists, let’s transcribe our comics together! On the Friday before the comics festival “Comic Invasion Berlin“, in the accompanying program, CIB21 Satellites, I offer an online workshop for fellow comic artists who want to collaborate on creating text-only versions of their online comics to make them more accessible. Screen-readable text-only versions accompany visual versions of my comics to make them accessibly to comics for blind people and everybody else that uses screen-readers to surf the web. This workshop especially invites artists of comics communicating activism from and for marginalized communities. As a queer and non-binary trans comic artist, communication is very close to my heart.

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I am excited, that the xier pronouns I developed, are getting used more, and I am looking forward to any neo-pronoun widespread and recognized as singular they. Thanks to Goethe-Institut London and Oslo for quoting me, <3. My quote, white letters on green: 'I want a widespread gender neutral alternative to »sie« and »er«- beautiful or ugly, I don't care but something that fills the language gap and works within German grammar.' At the left bottom of the image a black and white self-portrait of Illi Anna Heger.