Embodied

As a multimodal digital, audible, and tactile comic, Embodied is among my first experiments with access tools and innovating blind and low vision accessibility in memoir comics, graphic medicine, and art assemblages.

You may want to read this full intro first, or go directly to links from this page and choose your own pathway. On this page, you’ll find links to mix-and-match several media to experience the memoir comic. For example, listen to audio narration or screen-read text while scrolling tactile-ready, high-contrast images. Options include: connect to audio, link to images, access text either as narration only, or with image and sound descriptions embedded in the story.

Embodied is a symbolic memoir of change and adaptation. It’s part of my personal story of sudden vision loss during the early COVID pandemic. Audio, clickable on this page, moves the listener forward in time by pacing the narration of events, describing images, and bringing autobiographical details to the storyline.

This is a process narrative with a meditative and guided style. Somatic imagery creates part of the narration, and the reader is invited to imagine and feel the story taking shape.

Click to play audio for the sound story, followed by endnotes, information about project design and thank you’s, and bonus sounds (8 min, 51 sec).

In the touchable comic, pages unfold into an accordion style, swell paper booklet that is made to be explored. Braille words and raised lines add to the tactile experience of holding the comic, with a QR code link pointing to audio. Hidden interior elements tell the story in large print text.

Also on Instagram, @RaeRotti published Embodied as a series of posts with image descriptions and alt text. Go to two weeks’ consecutive posts starting April 6, 2023.

Prizewinner, 2022 Accessible Comics Competition. Rae Lanzerotti, 2023. Thank you to the Accessible Comics Collective, SFSU Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability.