Accessible comics for every reader

Comics should be universal. Most online comics are a picture of a page, with nothing for a screen reader to read and no way to follow the story except by looking at it. Guardian Comics is built differently, so you can read in the way that works for you.

All 8 issues have these features, covering 247 pages, 1,195 described panels and 1,982 lines of dialogue and narration.

Closed captions

Turn on captions with the CC button, or press C. Each line appears at the bottom of the screen with the name, colour and face of the character speaking, and the speaker is highlighted on the page, so it's always clear who said what. Narration and sound effects are captioned too.

In the CC menu, Text size makes captions smaller or larger, from 75% to 200%, and your choice is remembered. They also follow the text size set in your browser.

Help with translations

Captions can also be shown in Spanish, French, Japanese and Simplified Chinese. These are draft translations that fluent speakers haven't reviewed yet, so they may contain mistakes. If you speak one of these languages and would like to help check them, we'd love to hear from you at paul@guardiancomics.com.

Panel by panel

A full comic page can be a lot to take in, especially on a small screen, with low vision or if busy layouts make it hard to focus. Panels mode shows one panel at a time, in reading order, and glides to the next as you go.

Written for screen readers

Each page has a text description of its art and dialogue, reviewed by hand. It describes the setting, who's there and what's happening, along with anything else needed to follow the story. In Panels mode, a screen reader announces each panel's description and dialogue as it opens, whether captions are on or off.

Keyboard controls

You can read a whole issue without a mouse or touch screen:

• Right arrow or Page Down: next page or panel
• Left arrow or Page Up: previous page or panel
• Space: next (with Shift, previous)
• Home and End: first and last page
• C: captions on or off

Reading your way

• Choose Slides for one page at a time, Scroll for a continuous strip, or Panels.
• Use your browser's zoom to make any page larger.
• If your device is set to reduce motion, animation and smooth scrolling are turned down or off.
• Without JavaScript, an issue is still there to read as a simple scrolling page.
• There's no account, paywall or advertising in the way. Open an issue and start reading.

Where this came from

Our reader grew out of ComicA11y, an experiment by Paul Spencer at Humaan that aimed to achieve an all-inclusive online comic reading experience. It explored reading modes, closed captions with character avatars and text written specifically for screen readers, on a single short strip. ComicA11y by Humaan was named a Webby Honoree for Technical Achievement in 2021. Guardian Comics takes those ideas into a full library of comics.

Help us improve

This work isn't finished. If something gets in your way, or you read in a way we haven't thought of, please tell us at paul@guardiancomics.com.