So you want to make your Visual Novel friendly to screen readers and work well with Renpy's Self-Voicing function? (If you don't know what this is, press 'V' when your game is running to see the magic in action). Alt tag is your friend to make sure your masterpiece is accessible! Unfortunately, imagemaps don't play well with self-voicing by default, and you have to remember adding alt to every single hotspot and hotbar element. Without that, the screen reader and self-voicing will have nothing to say, which means someone might be locked out of progress. If you're working with tons and tons and tons of interactible components, you may find it difficult to check if you have everything covered. 

I keep forgetting to add alt to that one button so here I am.

This tool will scan your script files for elements without alt, and report that on your Lint screen. By default, it will look for hotbar and hotspot because I find them most easily missed, but you can also add textbutton, label, anything else really. It does not replace the original Lint report, it simply adds to it. To run it, run Lint from the launcher as usual.

While I don't scan textbutton, text, BarValue, label, etc by default because self-voicing already extracts their contents as is, keep in mind that you might still want to check them with self-voicing on to make sure that the contents are understandable without the surrounding visual context. You might very well want to add an alt anyway, if only to make it flow better (e.g. "Music Volume is at 50%" instead of just "Music Volume"). 

Installation

1. Drop the file into your project folder (in "game", where you have your other scripts).

2. Open and enter your project folder's path, save.

3. Open Ren'py launcher and run Lint. The report should be located below the original Lint warnings and above the statistics report.

Limitations

This tool was coded quick and dirty, so currently it:

• Requires full absolute path to your script folder
• Does not scan for files in subdirectories (edit the path for each subdirectory you want to check)
• Will produce false positive if your alt tags are located in the block below the displayable declaration (not in line with the keyword)

I may try to work on this in the future, though I cannot promise any timeline because it already serves me well enough as is. I do hope that despite its limitations, someone does find use of it and this will help more people implement alt in their Visual Novel.

Attribution

Inspired by Kigyo's awesome Lint+ tool. Some parts of the comment is copied from Lint+.

Terms of Use

Licensed under CC BY 4.0 – Feel free to use, modify, and share. Tweak the code to your liking, and if you make it better, tell me and drop a link!

Support

If you use this and want an update, please drop a comment! In the meantime, please check my other works.