Accessibility
Built so every operator
can use it.
Amateur radio has always welcomed operators who are blind, have low vision, are colour-blind or cannot use a mouse. Much of its software has not. ShackOS treats accessibility as part of the design, checked by automated tests on every change.
Screen readers
A dashboard rebuilt for listening.
A grid of visual cards is hard to navigate by ear. Screen-reader mode replaces it with a version built for it, rather than labelling the visual one and hoping.
- Headings and plain text. Each card becomes a section with a heading, so you can jump between them with your screen reader’s heading keys.
- Values read as words. The band forecast is a table you read across band by band, such as “20 meters: Good”, and gauges read their value, not a shape.
- Reorder without dragging. Move cards up and down with buttons instead of drag and drop.
- Elmer, one sentence at a time. His replies are announced in whole sentences as they arrive, not re-read from the top with every word.
- A text table for the signal map alongside the visual map.
Turn it on in the setup wizard, or any time in Settings → Appearance.
Low vision and colour vision
Contrast you can count on, and never colour alone.
- High Contrast Dark and High Contrast Light meet WCAG AAA contrast (7:1) for text. Their accent is violet rather than amber, so “clickable” never looks like a band condition.
- Every theme is measured. Contrast is computed from the real stylesheets by an automated test that fails the build if a theme drops below its target.
- Never colour alone. Band conditions always carry a word — Good, Fair, Poor, Closed — as well as a colour, because red–green colour blindness is common and band conditions are where it matters most.
Keyboard and motion
No mouse required.
- Skip link straight to the main content on every page.
- Visible focus on everything you can reach with Tab. The focus ring is never switched off.
- Dialogs that behave: focus moves into a dialog when it opens, stays there, and returns to where you were when you close it with Escape. Dialogs never vanish because of a stray click outside them.
- Fast keyboard logging in the field logger: type, Tab, Enter.
- Shortcuts: Ctrl+K (Cmd+K on a Mac) opens your Rolodex from anywhere.
- Reduced motion: if your device is set to reduce motion, ShackOS turns its animations off.
Accessibility statement
Where we are, honestly.
Our target is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 at Level AA across ShackOS, and Level AAA contrast in the two high-contrast themes.
Our status is partially conformant: most of ShackOS meets the target, and the parts that do not yet are listed below. We would rather tell you than have you find out.
Known limitations
- Maps and the 3D globe are visual. Screen-reader mode adds a text table for the signal map; the other maps do not yet have a full text alternative.
- Some dashboard cards — POTA spots, the POTA activator, hunter and stats cards, awards, the Rolodex card, and the Elmer and Quick Log cards — do not yet have a screen-reader version. Their full pages are reachable from the menu, and Elmer from his button.
- Testing with real assistive technology is not finished. Automated checks run on every change, but a complete pass with JAWS, NVDA and VoiceOver has not been done yet.
- Radio control (in testing) needs Chrome or Edge on a computer, because other browsers do not offer the serial access it depends on.
How we check
Automated tests run before every release: contrast is computed for every theme, every form field must have a real label, dialogs must trap focus correctly, and the POTA pages are scanned with the axe-core accessibility engine. Those tests stop a release that fails them.
Tell us what is in your way
If something in ShackOS does not work with the way you use a computer, we want to know. Contact us and choose “Accessibility”, or email [email protected]. Tell us what you were trying to do, and if you can, which browser and assistive technology you use. We read every report.