Welcome to the Babel-IF list

[Andrew Plotkin]

This mailing list is for discussion of the Babel IF Treaty
(http://babel.ifarchive.org/) and related issues. The Babel agreement has
been very stable over time, so this should be a low-traffic list. But
every few years, an issue comes up.

The Babel Agreement is basically about metadata for interactive fiction.
You should be on this list (or keep an eye on it) if you maintain an IF
development system (which packages games with metadata), or an IF service
site (IFDB, the Archive) which collates metadata, or an IF interpreter
which parses and displays metadata.

--Z

--
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*

[Andrew Plotkin]

(This already went around in email to some of us. I'm repeating it for
the mailing list.)

In recent intfiction.org discussion, someone said:

> Could the description of the cover art be added to the game description
> in the iFiction file?

(http://www.intfiction.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=11082)

That is, have a textual description of the cover art, for sight-impaired
players. Proposed update to section 5.9 is attached below.

I believe Ross Raszewski built the http://babel.ifarchive.org/ site. I
have edit access (since it's on the archive server), so I propose to
add a "babel_rev8.txt" file with the change. (I'm also going to do minor
updates to the site, i.e. change the Inform URL to inform7.com.)

In general I'm willing to take over maintaining this site, as long as
updates are small and rare. :) If we stick to backwards-compatible changes
like this, I think it's okay for me to perform these updates without
trying to contact every signee for permission. (Hopefully, everyone who is
interested will wind up on this mailing list.)

-----------
5.9. Cover art

The <cover> tag is optional, except that it is mandatory for an
iFiction record embedded in a story file which contains a cover
image; and the information must, of course, be correct.

If given, this section contains the tags below. The <format>,
<height>, and <width> tags are required. The <description> tag
is optional but recommended.

<cover>
<format>jpg</format>
<height>960</height>
<width>960</width>
<description>A man wearing an unusual hat.</description>
</cover>

[...]

5.9.3. <description>

This is a brief textual description of the image. An interpreter
might display this as an alternative when graphical display is not
available, or when supporting nonvisual users.
(Tag added in revision 8.)
-----------

(I also added <description> tags to the sample files in section 5.14.)

[Andrew Plotkin]

On Wed, 19 Feb 2014, Andrew Plotkin wrote:

> That is, have a textual description of the cover art, for sight-impaired
> players. Proposed update to section 5.9 is attached below.

I have now added this to the web site:

http://babel.ifarchive.org/
http://babel.ifarchive.org/babel_rev8.txt
http://babel.ifarchive.org/changes.txt

I have not updated the ifiction records in the downloadable (zipped)
example files. Nor have I tried to update any of the software to parse
the new tag.

[Andrew Plotkin]

Following up the last discussion, Graham suggested that Blorb should offer
a way to offer textual descriptions for all images. (Not just the cover
art.)

Seems sensible to me. And we might as well include sounds. I have
therefore written up this addition to the Blorb spec:

---------------
For a game to be fully accessible to visually impaired users, it should
provide textual descriptions to be displayed as alternatives to images.
Similarly, audio resources should have textual descriptions as
alternatives for hearing-impaired users.

The resource description chunk allows the Blorb file to offer this
information.

4 bytes 'RDes' chunk ID
4 bytes 4 chunk length
4 bytes num number of entries
... entries

The entries are variable-length, and look like:

4 bytes usage resource usage
4 bytes number number of resource
4 bytes length length of text (bytes)
length bytes text textual description (UTF-8,
not null-terminated)

There should be at most one entry for each resource -- that is, each
(usage, number) pair.

Resource descriptions are not required, but they are recommended for
significant sounds and images. (Images used for decoration, such as window
borders or text dividers, may not need textual descriptions.) Data and
executable chunks do not need descriptions; if they appear in this chunk,
the interpreter can ignore them.

(An interpreter with a web interface would apply the textual description
of an image as an "alt" attribute on the <img> tag.)
---------------

I note that since the cover art is an image resource, the cover art's
description will appear twice in the Blorb file. (Here, and in the
ifiction record.) This is okay by me.

[Andrew Plotkin]

On Thu, 27 Feb 2014, Andrew Plotkin wrote:

> Following up the last discussion, Graham suggested that Blorb should offer a
> way to offer textual descriptions for all images. (Not just the cover art.)

I've posted this change to the Blorb spec (http://eblong.com/zarf/blorb/).
I've also updated my blorbtool.py script (same web page) to parse and
display the resource description chunk, if one is found.

[Brandon Invergo]

>> That is, have a textual description of the cover art, for sight-impaired
>> players. Proposed update to section 5.9 is attached below.

I've added this functionality to version 0.3 of pyifbabel, the Python
library for handling all things Treaty of Babel, just released. In
particular, it can now read and write both IFiction files and blorbed
files with coverart descriptions.

You can find it at http://pyifbabel.invergo.net or on PyPI via your
favorite Python module installer thing. The library is still (slowly)
evolving, so I welcome comments and criticism.

Brandon




--
Brandon Invergo
http://brandon.invergo.net