V1.3 - Bookmarks!

Quick update!

• Bookmarks. The main book file for Apawthecaria now has a bookmark tree. It includes all major sections of the book, each region variant for each kind of encounter (E.g. Travel Encounters; Bog Travel, Forest Travel, etc), and a separate bookmark for each ingredient, in alphabetical order.
• Minor Corrections. A few tiny spelling errors here and there highlighted in comments and feedback from Discord.

Some transparency about Visual Accessibility. TL;DR, Apawthecaria won't be getting Accessibility Tags and time soon. 

I've been thinking about this pretty often, although I haven't actually had any requests for tags from readers. Apawthecaria relies on drawing and tracking your journey across a map, and every single page of this 220+ page book is illustrated, with a very granular (and often kinda hacky) set-up in regards to tables and presentation of information. In general, the game has multiple steep hurdles for VI folks 😓

I don't currently have the free time to totally strip the book back to basics and redesign everything in a way that can be (moderately) easily exported with Accessibility Tags for screen readers. An example problem are the Reagents: all of their stats are written up in tables that use custom fonts for icons (e.g. a lower case f becomes a Forest icon) paired with segmented text across multiple cells, some of which are merged. The reading experience is essentially a nightmare for a screen reader, and some information is locked away (the icons use the same letters with different fonts, so there's no way for a SR user to tell which icon is in use. They'll just hear "f", not "Forest - Unavailable" or "Forest - Rare"). I do know some very fancy design folks doing cool things with fonts, where perhaps they could set up some kind of code that makes "f-c" look like a "Forest - Common" icon. That's all theoretical though.

Perhaps in the future Anna and I will do a definitive Apawthecaria GOTY edition on Kickstarter, and as part of that we could raise the funds for me to work for a couple months on this, and consult with some VI folks about including alternative methods of play.

- Brian Tyrell (Stout Stoat)