West of Bathurst Returns(ish): Transcripts, Transcripts Everywhere

Hello, everybody. I’m still deep in the midst of attempting to read, like, 150 books in four months, so yes, I’ve been ignoring the blog again. However, today I had an idea.

Writing transcripts for It Never Rains has been something I’ve been doing since the comic started. It didn’t make sense to me to have a comic featuring a blind protagonist that couldn’t be read by blind people. My transcript descriptions are relatively sparse, but then, so are my panels. I want the comic to be relatively accessible, and therefore, I’ve lately been trying to clean up some of its less accessible elements: alt-texts not in the transcripts, undescribed banners, and so on.

However, I’ve completely neglected West of Bathurst in this regard. WoB has no transcripts. Its site design also isn’t what one might call “hugely awesome,” but I’m going to tackle the transcripts first.

On this, the more-or-less fifth anniversary of the end of WoB (okay, I’m a few weeks late, but still), I’m going to start adding transcripts to the comics one by one. I’ve actually begun with two comics, the very first and the very last, simply because I want to add a “Last” link to the transcripts, and if I do that without having a transcript on the index page, I’ll just get a multitude of broken links. I’ll post a new transcript every day, complete with new link buttons that are more like the ones on INR. Yes, it will take years to get through every comic, but it will be a nice way of revisiting WoB while also adding a helpful feature to it. I’ll post about every new transcript on the WoB Facebook page. It’ll be like a reunion tour of the comic. (I probably won’t tweet about it every day, simply because I already tweet a lot about It Never Rains. Maybe I’ll do one tweet a week or something like that.)

Check out the first comic’s transcript and the last comic’s transcript, then follow along every day if you like. If you think I’m missing something, let me know.