Leave Comic Sans Alone: Exploring Accessibility and Zine Making.
In this interactive talk, zine maker/researcher/librarian Lilith (Lea) Cooper will explore ways we can build access into zine making practices. Can we use alt-text in a way that’s both functional and creative? What happens when we want to be illegible? How are trigger warnings related to access? In a series of short (and fun!) activities we’ll explore some different aspects of access and zine making, including formatting, alt-text, audio descriptions and content warnings, and consider the relationship between zine making and access. Rather than thinking about access as a box we have to tick or something we tack on at the end of making a zine, we’ll consider how different access practices are and can be integrated into zine making as personal, intimate, acts of care and community building, or creative practices which add new dimensions to zines as a medium/media.
For those who would benefit, a more detailed breakdown of the talk and the related activities will be available closer to the time. If you make zines, you could bring some of your own zine pages you’re interested in exploring in the context of accessibility. Register.
Lilith (Lea, as in sea) Cooper is a white, queer, trans and disabled neurodivergent person living on the Fife Coast in Scotland with their partner, mother and cat. They are working on a collaborative PhD project between the University of Kent and the Wellcome Collection looking at the zines in the Wellcome library. They make zines, do zine librarianship at the Edinburgh Zine Library and facilitate zine making. You can find out more about their work at www.zinejam.com.