Thank (or Blame) MVNA For This

So I, uh, published a tool. Yay? Honestly, I’m so embarrassed, because this is a super small internal tool I coded in a hurry while preparing accessibility updates for The Butterfly Dreams. Without MVNA Jam, I wouldn’t have dreamt of releasing something like this, but I keep seeing awesome stuff in Devtalk so I hope that this would help someone too, however simple and inefficient it is.

An expanded context, perhaps, if you are not already familiar with Renpy’s built-in accessibility tools: it has tons of them. Out of the box. Shift+A in any game brings the Accessibility Option screen (unless explicitly disabled by the dev), and ‘V’ enables text-to-speech. Alt is the term for caption, or alternate text, something that would be picked up by TTS or screen reader in lieu of whatever is originally there (or in some cases, in lieu of nothing).

For the most part, unless you are customizing the hell out of your basic GUI, your VN should be fairly navigable without extra effort on your part. Unfortunately, skinning your game is probably the first thing everyone wants to do, and among the easiest way is by using imagemaps because this is kinda similar to making websites out of Photoshop slices in the 2000s (I’m dating myself, eh). And let’s face it, Renpy’s screen language is quite a lot when you’re just starting. Herein lies the problem because… TTS and screen readers pick up nothing from imagemaps, because they are… images. You have to explicitly supply the alt tags for it to read anything at all. If you never know the tag exists, your game has just lost potential players.

And even in parts where the screen reader/TTS auto-extract the text, things might still make zero sense without the surrounding visual context, so you want a more informative alt. I spent a long time making sure everything in Butterfly is captioned, and I’m pretty sure I haven’t done good enough job. I have used Ren’py for years and years, but this is the first time I ever give this feature even a moment of thought, and only because my eyesight has been falling considerably in the last couple years. Shame on me.

So. I run out of things to say. Don’t disable features you don’t use yourself, somebody else might use it? Please check out our games? If you know how to optimize the code, especially to address the current limitations, let me know? Remember, thank (or blame) Devtalk for this. Or join the server if you haven’t.