itch.io

After I realized I could use a keyboard instead of a mouse (using the tab key, the enter key, and sometimes shift-tab), I thought about screenreaders (tools that read text aloud so that blind or dyslexic people can hear what’s on the screen) and decided to check if text like the story text were encoded in a way such tools could easily read.

Simply selecting the image, right-clicking and then selecting “show source of selection” showed that it had these properties (I added an extra space here just to make sure the image doesn’t somehow end up showing inside this message although I think it’d be unlikely to do so):

< img src="images/story.png" data-raw="" height="350px">

To tell screenreaders what it says, I’d probably have added the following before the closing angle bracket (adding a space after the the quoting marks with “350px”, and you’d probably want to include the whole text, I’m just shortening it so I don’t need to type it all):

 alt="In a future... mixed up."

It’s possible if such an alt text is missing that a screenreader might look for it encoded in XML inside the image file, but I also checked for that and I didn’t see any text there either (and I would think adding alt text through the HTML would be more reliable.

Of course, another issue for players who can’t read well might be the “the end” text having a timer, so if someone is able to read but only slowly, then then maybe a “return to title” button might be easier for them to use. I wouldn’t be too concerned about the animations being timed, since those don’t force the player to read at a particular pace. Even the fact that the game was probably designed for mouse input but plays fine without a mouse probably means it can be played by some people who would have been physically unable to play some other games.

Edit: And the “congratulations, you made the sale” text is also on a timer. There’s plenty of time to read it, but if you want to completely let players read at their own pace, I’d probably give that one too a continue button. I’m not going to subtract points for accessibility issues though, since “normal” people can play the game just fine and I’m normal enough to not have trouble reading any of the text in the game (except for the spacepig cipher description, which seems to be an issue for everyone). There are two other games where I did have trouble reading text, one because of tight time limits and one because the font was unreadably small. And games playable without looking at the screen are pretty rare, and I don’t think I’ve seen such games in the jam, this one probably comes closest, so I wouldn’t punish it for the lack of alt texts.