Accessibility

FlickOS runs on old laptops with worn touchpads, on small screens and on big ones with scaling, for people with poor eyesight and people who never touch a mouse. All four areas below are Must: a FlickOS program that can’t be used one of these ways is broken, not unpolished.

Keyboard

A11Y-1 Must: Everything works without a mouse

Every action in a FlickOS window or surface can be done from the keyboard alone:

• Tab and the arrow keys reach every control, in reading order (top to bottom, left to right).
• Nothing is mouse-only. Something on right-click also opens with the Menu key and Shift+F10. Something on hover also shows on focus. A drag has a button or a key that does the same.
• A gesture or a timed key (hold Super, tap Super) always has a plain alternative too: the shortcut sheet is also Keyboard Shortcuts in the menu, and the start menu also opens from the panel button.
• The first focus is where the user will act: the search box in the start menu, the first field in a dialog.

A11Y-2 Must: Escape backs out

• Escape closes dialogs, popovers, menus and sheets, and cancels whatever they were about to do.
• In a window with a search box, Escape first clears the search.
• Should: Escape also closes a window whose only job is a quick choice (the layout chooser). Main windows close with Super+Q (labwc) and should also close with Ctrl+W.

A11Y-3 Must: Mnemonics on buttons and form labels

Buttons, check boxes and the labels of form fields have a mnemonic (Alt plus the underlined letter): Gtk.Button.new_with_mnemonic("_Add User…"), and a label with use_underline=True, mnemonic_widget=entry. Within one window or dialog, each letter is used once. Standard buttons keep the usual letters: _Cancel, _Close, _Apply, _Remove.

A11Y-4 Should: The usual shortcuts work

• Ctrl+F focuses the search box where there is one. Typing a letter anywhere outside a text field starts a search (Settings does both).
• Enter activates the default button in a dialog or the first search result.
• A button’s shortcut, if it has one, is in its tooltip.

Seeing

A11Y-5 Must: The focus is always visible

Keep the theme’s focus ring. Never remove it in CSS (outline: none, a transparent border on :focus). When the focused widget scrolls, it stays in view (Settings’ search scrolls the result’s row into view and focuses its control).

A11Y-6 Must: Text is readable in both styles, and color is never the only signal

• Contrast: text meets WCAG AA against its background, in Dark and in Light: at least 4.5:1 for normal text, 3:1 for large text (18 pt, or 14 pt bold) and for the outlines of controls. Arc’s accent blue (#5294e2) is below 4.5:1 on both backgrounds, so it isn’t a color for text. The theme’s own colors do. Check any color you set, and translucent backgrounds against the lightest and darkest wallpaper.
• Dimmed text (dim-label) is for secondary text only: a subtitle, a hint. Anything the user must read to use a control is not dimmed.
• Not by color alone: a state is also shown with a word, an icon or a shape. The chooser marks the layout in use with a “Current setting” badge, not just a highlight. A warning has the warning bar’s icon, not just orange text. A running app in the dock has a marker, not only a tint.

Assistive technology

A11Y-7 Must: Layouts survive larger text and scaling

People turn up the font size in Appearance and the screen scale in Displays. At text scale 1.5 and screen scale 2, nothing is cut off, overlaps or needs horizontal scrolling:

• Labels that can grow wrap (wrap=True with max_width_chars, as Ui.label() does) or ellipsize with the full text in a tooltip.
• set_size_request() gives a minimum width, never a height for text, and never a fixed size for a container of text. Let GTK size things from their content.
• Test with gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface text-scaling-factor 1.5 and a labwc output scale of 2 (wlr-randr --output NAME --scale 2).

A11Y-8 Must: Every control has a name a screen reader can say

Orca isn’t installed by default, but anyone can add it, and GTK 3 exposes FlickOS windows to it through ATK.

• A button with only an icon has a tooltip and an accessible name, both saying what it does:

  button = Gtk.Button(relief=Gtk.ReliefStyle.NONE, tooltip_text=text)
  button.get_accessible().set_name(text)          # flickos-menu's icon_button()

• A form field is named by its label (mnemonic_widget), a row’s control by the row’s title (label.set_mnemonic_widget(control), or get_accessible().set_name(title)).
• An image that carries information not given in text next to it has an accessible description. A decorative one, or a layout preview beside the layout’s name, doesn’t need one.
• A layer-shell surface that takes no keyboard focus (the shortcut sheet while Super is held) is a shortcut, not the only way: the same content opens as an interactive surface (flickos-shortcuts show).