Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast – The Accessible Version

This is a guest article by the fantastic Kyra Helfrich, a longtime friend of the Possum Creek and who was the screenreader consultant and ended up pouring 3 months of their time into making the PDF of Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast as screenreader-accessible as possible. Please laugh and cry with us while she talks through the process and what few glitches remain.

The screenreader-accessible version of Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast will be releasing next week on the 15th, alongside a huge host of other news about the book, so get ready and gear up to go back to the B&B!

The team working on Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast have been making the impossible happen for years. Creating a 500 page RPG with variable rules, 1000 pieces of art, set characters, a story written by multiple people keeping cohesion throughout, online integration, and layout that innovates and dazzles on each page is a lot for anyone, especially a small indie publishing company. And CERTAINLY, making a book like that accessible to assistive technology felt like a monumental task fit only for the most powerful wielders of accessibility magic.

So who the heck am I to take this on? Hi, I’m Kyra Helfrich, an accessibility professional and big believer in this project. I know how important it is to be able to access things via the methods most comfortable for you, so I was honored to take on the witchcraft of spinning up a version of the Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast book accessible to screen readers, keyboard, and assistive technology.

Many of you know that this is a game about a very powerful witch who traded her heart for her greatest desire, and at some points during this process I felt that I could relate. Thus, here we are at the end of that journey. Let’s talk about what I did.

Platforms

I tested this book with VoiceOver on Apple devices, and NVDA on Windows. In my experience, these two screen readers are the pickiest, so making them both behave with this book was my goal. After much tweaking, I can tell you that all the text and alt-text in this book now reads with both of these screen readers.

Caveats

Let’s set our expectations correctly. This is and for the foreseeable future will be a fixed-layout pdf (meaning the text on the page will not be resizable and the fonts are not changeable). That format is inherently inaccessible to some folks, namely those who require large text. I took wisdom from Laura Brady’s article about fixed-layout accessibility, which has comforted me through this process. She talks about children’s books, and developing thoughtful alt-text that fits the tone of the book, which I hope you all feel that the alt-text added to YB&B is. When approaching this book’s accessibility plan, I decided to think of it more like a storybook, a scrapbook, and an art book, rather than an instruction manual or something more clinical and held to legal standards (because if I did, I would fall into despair). This means I had to take some creative liberty with the exact accessibility standards that I generally deal with working in web design. I hope it still fits the grand majority of your needs.

Here are some challenges I faced in this process, how I tackled them, and what you can expect.

Screen Readers read behind the scenes…

Screen readers parse a book by reading something called the Tags of a document. This is what those look like. Much like HTML, they use a hierarchical structure to define the document.

If you are a user of the screen reader NVDA, that will likely provide you with the best experience of Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast. It reads the words and alt-text, as determined by the tags, in order, by line, paragraph, or page, without adding in anything funky that I or the writers didn’t write. Paired with Acrobat Reader, you should have a fairly smooth experience of the book.

…VoiceOver is trying to read screens

VoiceOver is trying to do some optical character recognition. This means that it’s going to read whatever characters are contained within the boundaries of an image or container. You may hear examples of that when using VoiceOver to read about Hey Kid’s clones (Orange Kid is sitting on Bud Woodruff’s shoulders, and VO will tell you “13”, reading the number on Bud’s jersey) or when hearing Character or Resident names read out of order when their last name is longer than their first, or their names are positioned in an arch over their art, for example “Nimbus Shadowside” reading as “Shadowside Nimbus”, or “The Moon Prince” reading all the letters out of order. Perhaps in the future VO will actually be better with this, or be able to determine what’s not in the tags and read that stuff only, but for now, it’s often incorrect. Even so, I still enjoy reading the book with VO on an iPad in the Books app.

FONT MATTERS

Especially with VoiceOver. Like I mentioned before, VO thinks it’s smarter than the tags and reading order. Therefore, with some of the fancy fonts used in headers, letters, etc., it’ll randomly skip some characters in some of the fancy fonts. Or, it’ll do some otherwise disruptive wild stuff. This is where I must recommend exporting this pdf to a txt file for certain chapters if you’re using VoiceOver (Acrobat > File > Export To > Text (accessible)). If you know the book already, it won’t be a surprise that they’re The Rusalka’s Mirror, Ichor’s chapter, and The Heartless Contract. They do not read appropriately with VO, but they do export in proper reading order with words more clearly spoken.

If you’re using NVDA, I’m joyful to announce that these sections do read correctly! The wonders of technology abound.

With and And, and And and With

If any of you peeked into the pdf with a screen reader before accessibility remediation, you would hear each chapter include some strange “z” and “p” readout when describing who’s in the chapter. That’s because Grub included a beautiful font that is glyphs for some common words in headers and important descriptions (i.e. you type “z”, and it visually looks like a calligraphed “With” on the page). While it’s beautiful and wholly appropriate for this book, you can imagine that, like Wingdings, a glyph font might not be super accessible if you were trying to convey what the glyph represents, rather than the letter that printed it (in fact, try copying Wingdings into Google translate! It’s a great way to send secret messages, but not the thing we are trying to do here). I truly felt defeated about this for months… until I tagged them as figures, to which I could add alt text.

Depending on your platform, some places in this book still might read the z or p or w or G or H or something else. That’s because the glyphs in those locations are part of headings. I felt it was more important to preserve the header structure than to have those small words read, but I did attempt to add the real words of the heading to the Real Text section behind the scenes, which seems to work with NVDA. I’m sorry they don’t entirely make sense if you’re using a different platform (and I’m sorry VoiceOver didn’t decide to use its OCR attempt for good in that case???).

Feeding E. Vermi Boletus

Have you noticed all the beautiful little bullet points all across this book? It wouldn’t be right to just have a plain black dot indicating those lists in a book this whimsical. That’s why Grub also chose glyphs for these bulleted lists. Whether it was +, U, O, or !, you’d hear it spoken before every bulleted point in a list in YB&B. “! Solve a problem by swallowing it” is one of E. Vermi Boletus’ bingos, so as I went page by page, deleting each bullet point one by one, I imagined I was feeding them to E. Vermi Boletus. My copy’s E. Vermi Boletus certainly doesn’t live in the pantry anymore.

Where the bullet points do still read in this book, that is relevant information. Sometimes journeys or mechanics will have two or three “O O O” characters in a row to denote if you need to allocate more resources to unlock that thing (see: Amelie’s Big Day Off).

My opinion on strikes

Pro.

But in all seriousness. Did you know screen readers and other assistive tech do not pick up on strike-through in text? Any of you who have seen Sal’s page can understand the problem here. It struck fear in me (please laugh).

How I fixed this: I created alt text for each scribble on the page, and placed it after each text element that was visually crossed out. I think it works… kinda well! Especially for something that looks truly impossible to communicate to assistive tech.

Help Accessibility Experts Help You

Fixing accessibility on any project can often feel like you’re drowning in issues (my to-do list ended up being like 13 pages long?). From editing, writing, and adding alt-text for 1000 images, to listening to this book over and over, noting everything that wasn’t quite right and iterating different ways to get it working, this really took a while. Here are some things that writers and designers can think about to make this process faster and less tedious in the future:

• Accessibility takes the time it takes, but you can lessen the time it takes by starting early.
• Alt-text is an art best written by the artist, placed in the file information of the image, and edited by your accessibility team.
• Even if your book is visually designed in a fairly straightforward fashion, you can benefit from accessibility remediation to ensure that the document is accessible behind the scenes. If you can visually read it, it doesn’t mean that assistive technology can!
• Just because software’s automatic accessibility checker says that a document passes accessibility checks does not mean that it works the way assistive tech users need it to. Testing the accessibility of anything requires a human touch, because those auto checkers do not check everything!

We’re adrift without our anchors! (Please, Adobe, fix accessibility bugs)

You may notice that nearly every page of this book looks different. In InDesign, I wanted to be able to anchor images to be read where they belong in the text. But… I couldn’t. It fully wrecked the formatting every time I tried, and that’s a bona fide issue Adobe hasn’t fixed... pushing a very necessary accessibility step LATER in the process for everyone attempting to create accessible documents. It’s always best to fix what we can inside the source document, and this pushes us outside of it. You may be able to tell that people are irate from the comments (so do us a favor and upvote this issue if you have an account so that it gets more traction, please).

Thank you!

Possum Creek Games is a leader in their field for wanting this book to be accessible to users of all kinds, and that is something I hope only becomes more common. I’m grateful to have been a part of the process of bringing that to you. If you too want to help support more accessible gaming for all, check out the DOTS RPG Project where you can find free 3D-printer files for braille-faced polyhedral dice, as well as other ways to support blind gamers.

Bonus: Metaphors that were used to describe what making this book as accessible as reasonably possible felt like:

• I’m scrubbing the walls of the bed and breakfast
• I’m brushing this book’s teeth
• I’m in the backrooms of this pdf
• I’m virtually taking every line, paragraph, and image of this document, opening a 500 page blank book, and gluing it down with glitter glue one by one (ironically, how I think Grub would like this book made in real life if possible)
• This document is absolutely haunted or cursed in at least 3 ways (where is Amelie with the anti-curse water?)