Translation and accessible player material

Action Stations can give players the briefing, handouts and injects in Spanish as well as English, and every player document is built to be read with a screen reader. The app’s own screens stay in English.

Spanish for players

1. Open the scenario and choose the Languages tab. Tick Spanish (US) for the briefing, handouts and the injects players see. Tick Also translate controller material only if controllers need the handbook in Spanish too; it is off by default.
2. Check the provider named under the switch. Translate sends the English text to the model routed to Translation in Providers (the drafting model when Translation is not set). A cloud provider is marked as one, and the usual cloud preview and redaction apply.
3. Press Translate. The briefing, the handouts and every inject that reaches a player are translated. Controller-only rows are skipped. Names, handles, codes, numbers, times and units stay as written. Running Translate again translates only what is missing or out of date; Retranslate on one row redoes that item.
4. Review each item with Review: the English is on the left and cannot be edited; the Spanish is on the right. Saving marks the item Reviewed. Ctrl or Cmd + Enter saves and moves to the next item. Accept all in this scenario marks every machine translation reviewed without reading it, so use it only after reading; it never accepts an item whose English changed.
5. Edit the Glossary for terms that must be translated one way. The default pair is EXERCISE to EJERCICIO. A translation that leaves out a glossary term the English uses is flagged in the list and in the review.

An item is Not translated, Needs review (machine translation), English changed (the English was edited after it was translated) or Reviewed.

Exporting

On the Export screen, Player material sets the language of the Player Briefing Packet, the Player Handouts and the Player Injects: English, Spanish, or English and Spanish.

• The Spanish files are written to an es/ folder of the export, with -es in their names. In the distribution ZIP they are in players/es/, and everything is also in facilitator/. With Spanish alone, the English briefing and handouts are left out of players/.
• The export is refused while any translated item is not reviewed. The message lists the items. Review them, or tick Export unreviewed translation: every page then carries “Traducción automática sin revisar / Unreviewed machine translation” in its footer.
• Also write the controller material in Spanish puts the handbook and the controller materials in facilitator/es/. They never go to players/.
• The blank ICS 201 and 203 forms, the ExPlan, the player Situation Manual and the debrief survey forms stay English. Participant surveys are translated (see below).
• Dates and the page chrome follow the language (es-US). The exercise marking in a Spanish document is “EJERCICIO — PARA USO EN ENTRENAMIENTO” unless the exercise details set another marking. FEMA’s Spanish HSEEP doctrine calls an exercise “ejercicio” and sets no banner text, so “EJERCICIO” is the term; the wording after the dash is ours, and you can change it in the exercise details.
• Pictures of text-bearing injects (tweets, memos, notices) are drawn again from their template with the Spanish text and the template’s Spanish labels when the export runs; photographs are reused.

Screen readers

Every exported PDF is tagged and sets the document language, a title, one level-1 heading and headings in order; tables have column headers; lists are lists. For each inject picture in the master inject deck and in the Player injects document, the words of the inject follow the picture as text a screen reader reads (not visible on the page in the regular packet), and the picture’s alt text is a short label. The inject media PDFs the app renders for paper-style injects are tagged too.

Check a packet with VoiceOver (macOS) or NVDA (Windows): open the PDF, list headings, and read an inject page. node scripts/check-pdf-accessibility.mjs <folder or PDF>... runs veraPDF (PDF/UA-1) on exported PDFs when veraPDF is installed and says so when it is not.

Known limits of the PDFs Chromium writes: running headers and footers are page text and may be read on every page; text generated by CSS (page numbers and the stamp) is not tagged; and PDF/UA conformance is not guaranteed. No PDF/UA validator run is recorded for the Spanish forms. The language tag and tagged structure of the Spanish packet, injects and survey form are checked automatically. To validate PDFs yourself, install veraPDF from verapdf.org and run it on the exported files.

Surveys translate like injects: they appear in the Languages list as Survey: … items, you review them side by side, and the Spanish form is printed with the Spanish exports. Debrief surveys are not translated.

For a formal statement, the Accessibility Conformance Report (VPAT, Section 508) rates the app, the player page and these PDFs against WCAG 2.2 AA and lists the known exceptions.

Large print

Tick Also write a large-print copy to get -large-print.pdf beside the briefing, handouts and player injects, in each language chosen. Letter size, one column, sans-serif, body text 18 point, headings 24 point or larger, line height 1.5, left aligned, black on white, no background images. Each inject picture is shown full width and followed by its words at 18 point. The blank ICS 201 form is left out of the large-print briefing; it has its own file.

For template authors

See “Translation” in the templates guide: x-translate, labels/<lang>.json and the t helper.