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The following is a response to this post which Teresa Tensuan elicited from Franny Howes, on Ms. Tensuan's group, "COMIXSCHOLARS-L."

This is something I've been thinking about lately--I am a comics scholar
and currently teach some comics in my writing class, but I also am
interested in Universal Design for Learning and having an accessible
classroom.
I think this is one way webcomics are ahead of print-based comics--they
have begun to harness the power of user-generated content to generate
text-only transcriptions.
There's a service called "Oh No Robot" (http://www.ohnorobot.com/) created
by Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics that allows webcomics creators to add an
option to their webpages that lets readers transcribe the comic,
ostensibly for the purposes of making them searchable.  But there's
potential for making comics accessible to screen-reading devices throught
his service as well.
I don't know what such a thing would look like for print comics--in this
case, people are writing short descriptions of one-page comics, in a
distributed manner, so lots of people are each doing a small amount of
work.
 More capital would have to be invested in doing any given book, or a large
number of books.
As far as a graphic novel not being able to be experienced through text
alone, this may be true, but we still transcribe works into other media
for accessibility purposes.  For example, my school's accessibility
standards require that if you show a film in class, there be a transcript
available for visually impaired students.  These may not be ideal
representations of the work, but there are many cases where they have to
be made.
Anyway, this issue has been on the surface of my brain lately because of a
conference I went to recently, and I'd be interested in other people's
experiences with the matter.

Best,
Franny Howes