Engineering Inclusive Digital Visual Narratives: EDRLab’s Strategy for Interoperability and Accessibility

The global visual narrative market—spanning bande dessinée, manga, webtoons, and comics—is currently undergoing a digital-first explosion, yet this rapid growth is obstructed by severe technological fragmentation. This “Wild West” environment of proprietary silos prevents interoperability, stifles innovation, and leaves millions of readers without a consistent or accessible experience.

EDRLab’s vision is to bridge the gap between this industrial boom and rigorous open standards. By working directly with industry partners, we are evolving publishing frameworks—such as updating EPUB for scrollable content and advancing the multimodal Divina format—to create a unified, technically robust ecosystem. Our commitment is to ensure that the future of digital visual storytelling is “born-accessible,” utilising multimodal research to build a truly inclusive, interoperable, and standardised future for visual narratives worldwide.

The visual narrative market explosion

Let’s have a look at the Japanese market, the global barometer for manga. In 2025, digital sales accounted for 76.1% of Japan’s manga market (up from 72.7% in 2024; source: 出版科学研究所 / Research Institute for Publications, AJPEA). We are no longer talking about a “digital transition”; we are looking at a digital-first industry.

In parallel, Asia witnesses the rise of Webtoons (vertical, scroll-based storytelling born in South Korea): the domestic Korean webtoon market is estimated at €1.56bn (KOCCA, 2024). Yet, unlike the early days of EPUB, which unified the text ebook market, the visual narrative space remains a “Wild West.” High-quality content is often trapped in proprietary silos, and the reading experience varies wildly between platforms. This fragmentation prevents interoperability, stifles innovation, and limits accessibility for millions of readers.

State of standards and technical developments

Scrolled comics

Our technical response centres on the evolution of standard formats. The EPUB 3.4 Publishing Digital Comics Task Force, facilitated by Hadrien Gardeur, Deputy Director at EDRLab, and Shinya Takami, CTO at Kadokawa, is tackling one of the industry’s most requested features: native support for scrolled content.

The traditional EPUB fixed layout was designed around the “page” metaphor—mimicking the physical book. However, the Webtoon generation thinks in terms of a continuous flow. Our current work focuses on defining how metadata and navigation should behave in a vertical environment. This includes handling complex image transitions, ensuring performance on low-end devices, and maintaining the integrity of the artist’s vision across different aspect ratios.

Divina format

Beyond EPUB, we continue, with some industrial EDRLab’s members like Mangas.io, to push Divina (Digital Visual Narrative), a format dedicated to comics with an ambitious multimodal architecture. While EPUB remains the “Swiss Army knife” of publishing, Divina enables richer, more interactive visual experiences, laying the foundation for practical progress toward accessibility and next-gen visual narrative for this content — think of it as the high-performance vehicle for high-end graphic novels. By developing these in parallel, we provide the industry with a spectrum of tools suited for everything from a simple manga volume to an experimental, interactive masterpiece.

Ecosystem

Because a standard only exists if it is widely used, this work is mirrored on the implementation side through ongoing evolutions in Thorium Reader and the Readium ecosystem. These multiplatform reading applications and development kits enable standards to be exercised in real-world reading scenarios, strengthening UX and ensuring interoperability on a global scale.

As a reminder, Readium LCP has become an ISO standard, ISO/IEC 23078-2:2024, through a joint effort carried out notably by Laurent Le Meur, Director of EDRLab, and Taehyun Kim, CTO of the Korean company DRM Inside. This is a strong signal for a digital visual narratives market that has matured and has reached around €5bn globally. Beyond protection, the EPUB–LCP pairing brings these technologies closer to a role as a pivot stack for visual narratives, capable, over time, of supporting a full chain for archiving, distribution, and representation, meaning rendering and display, at scale, as EPUB work, including EPUB 3.4, and dedicated formats such as Divina, converge across usage and implementation.

Pioneering Inclusive Design: The ENACA Project

Industrial expansion is inherently flawed if it fails to be inclusive. The ENACA Project (Enhancing Accessibility in Comic Albums) is our primary strategic vehicle for embedding accessibility within the architecture of visual narratives. Moving beyond conventional linear adaptations that often dilute the medium, ENACA leverages a multimodal scientific framework—uniting computer vision, Large Language Models (LLMs), and cognitive research—to architect a reading experience that preserves the artist’s original vision.

Facilitated by a high-level consortium led by La Rochelle University (L3i) and Mangas.io and comprising EDRLab, Human Science Toulouse University, and the Valentin Haüy Association, this initiative addresses the complex technical hurdles in comic accessibility. Our focus encompasses granular character segmentation at the pixel level, the semantic analysis of dialogue across nonlinear layouts, and the generation of sophisticated, context-aware narration.

By design, ENACA bridges the gap between laboratory research and global industrial standards. Through our leadership in evolving EPUB and the Divina format, EDRLab is ensuring that these breakthroughs are hard-coded into the publishing ecosystem. We are establishing the technical foundation for “born-accessible” digital storytelling, ensuring that, from manga to webtoons, the medium’s future is fundamentally open to every reader.

Strategic Research Alliances

EDRLab is strengthening its collaborative architecture by establishing deep scientific partnerships with specialised research units dedicated to the digital narrative landscape. Our mission is to accelerate applied research across the spectrum of bande dessinée, manga, and graphic novels—prioritising sophisticated image processing, structural semantic analysis, and multimodal accessibility—to advance open industrial standards and their technical deployment.

We invite all EDRLab members interested in these pioneering fields to contribute, propose new consortia, or integrate into emerging initiatives. We are seeking visionary industry stakeholders, agile startups, and academic institutions to join this concerted effort toward a standardised future.