Accessibility

What works, how, and what does not yet.

Auracle is a dense expert tool. Coverage is uneven, and this page says where.

Keyboard

Everything structural is reachable from the keyboard, including wiring.

The design principle is one tab stop per region, arrows inside it. Tabbing through several hundred rack controls would be unusable, so the bank is a single stop, the rack is a single stop, and the node bank is one stop per group. Arrows move within.

The full map is in Keyboard and MIDI. The path most worth knowing is placing a module without a mouse:

Tab to the catalogue → ↑↓ to a module → Enter to arm it → ↑↓ walks the legal sockets, each one announced → Enter places it.

Focus is always visible, and dialogs return focus to whatever opened them.

Screen readers

• The bank announces its cursor. Rows carry ids and the list carries aria-activedescendant.
• Rows carry their whole state in the label (name, id, saved, rating, prediction), because the row's buttons sit outside the tab order and the label has to encode what they would have said.
• Sockets announce what will happen when you arrow onto them: whether placing here inserts, replaces or wraps.
• Transient messages go to an aria-live toast region.
• Persistent conditions such as a muted unvetted patch or a crashed engine go to a pinned role="alert" strip that stays until the condition is resolved, rather than a toast that vanishes before it is read.

Touch and coarse pointers

Every rack gesture works under a finger on a tablet: knob drags, cable pulls, locks, the ⋯ menus.

Two rules carry it. Controls that own a drag claim the gesture before the browser can, which lets the rack frame keep its own panning. And affordances a mouse reveals by hovering (knob lock dots, the bank's stars and cut) are shown outright on a coarse pointer, because hover-to-reveal on a tablet means never. Small glyphs get an invisible finger pad, created only for coarse pointers, so desktop hit areas are unchanged.

Hit targets

Hit areas are measured with elementFromPoint rather than eyeballed. A knob's whole face is grabbable, including under its ticks, track and value arc, and a jack responds across its full ring diameter rather than only where its outline is painted.

Colour and contrast

Text meets 4.5:1 against its background. The palette has two tiers for this: a text tier that clears the ratio, and a separate stroke tier for wire glow and jack rings, where contrast rules do not apply.

Colour is never the only channel. Green versus amber distinguishes audio from modulation, but modulation cables also terminate in a named destination, and signal kinds are carried by jack labels as well as colour. Style islands are hue-coded on the taste map and named in text everywhere they appear.

Motion

The rack pulses modulation cables at their modulator's rate, which carries information rather than decorating. The documentation site honours prefers-reduced-motion. The instrument does not yet gate its own animations on it, which is listed as a gap below.

Known gaps

• No handheld layout. A coarse pointer under 620px gets a stand-in screen instead of the instrument. Deliberate for now: boot costs ~40 renders that a phone would pay for and have nowhere to display. It does mean Auracle is unusable on a phone.
• prefers-reduced-motion is not honoured in the instrument. The docs site respects it; the rack's pulsing cables and the boot animation do not.
• The taste map is visual only. The STYLES and DIRECTIONS tabs carry the same information as named coefficients and are the accessible route to it, but the map's spatial reading is not available another way.
• Screen-reader coverage is deepest where it was tested. The bank and the wiring path were built and verified against a screen reader. The scope configuration and the image exporter were not.
• No high-contrast theme. The palette clears AA but there is no AAA mode and no way to raise contrast beyond it.

If you hit something not listed here, an issue is genuinely useful.