Webtoon Accessibility

The practice of making webtoons—vertically scrolling digital comics—accessible to people with disabilities, particularly blind and low vision users. Key challenges include converting rich visual narratives into audio form while preserving emotional engagement, pacing, and storytelling nuance. Approaches include audio descriptions that narrate visual content, sound effects timed to convey actions and atmosphere, character-specific voice acting or TTS voices, and panel transition cues. Naver Webtoon has begun implementing OCR and object detection for text extraction, and some series now include audio descriptions. Research shows that the timing of sound effects relative to narration significantly affects both immersion and comprehension.