The generalisation of user-friendly and mobile interfaces like smart phones, eBook readers and tablets has accelerated the transition of comic books to the digital format. Although such user interfaces are not always fit for use by people with special needs, the underlying platform offers a large number of innovative services which opens a wide spectrum of new possibilities for enhancing accessibility.#R##N##R##N#This paper explores how these new technologies can improve the digital access to comic books. Our main contribution is the inclusion of optical character recognition within text bubble associated to comics characters. The recognised text can then be fed into a text-to-speech engine for an improved experience. We also details performance improvements of other functionalities such as the panel order detection and special backgrounds. Finally, we discuss how these application specific adaptations can be applied to other contexts and which kind of future deployment can be anticipated.
['Christophe Ponsard', 'Ravi Ramdoyal', 'Daniel Dziamski']
An OCR-Enabled digital comic books viewer