Accessibility

What Ebbe does for a keyboard, a screen reader, larger text and less motion — and what it does not do yet.

Ebbe should work without a mouse, without colour, and at the text size you actually read at. This chapter says what that means in practice, so you can find out whether Ebbe suits you without having to try everything first.

Without a mouse

Everything can be reached with Tab and used with Enter or Space. The keyboard chapter has the shortcuts; this is what surrounds them.

A skip link comes first. Press Tab once on a fresh page and a link appears at the top left: it jumps past the navigation to the content. Every screen begins with the same fourteen navigation entries, so without it you would pay fourteen presses before reaching the page you asked for.

A dialog keeps you. While an item form or a confirmation is open, Tab stays inside it and wraps round at the end rather than wandering onto the page behind — which you cannot see and cannot click anyway. Escape closes it, and the cursor goes back to whatever opened it, so you carry on from where you were instead of starting the page again.

A month opens with the keyboard. In the forecast, each month’s name is a button. Enter opens that month’s payments; the header has a button that opens them all at once.

With a screen reader

Every control has a name, and the names are translated with the rest of the interface.

The charts are also tables. The forecast chart and the statistics chart each carry every figure they draw as a table that only a screen reader sees — month by month, with income, spending, the net and the balance. Nothing in a chart is behind a mouse-over.

Where a chart would only repeat itself, it says nothing. The ring on the analysis screen sits next to a list that already names every category with its share and its amount, so the drawing itself is skipped and only the total is read out. Hearing the same nine categories twice is not more accessible.

An error is attached to its field. When a form refuses, the message is tied to the field it is about, so it is read when you reach that field rather than being an unattached sentence somewhere on the page.

Larger text

Under Settings → Appearance there is a text size: normal, medium or large. It scales the whole interface, not only the words — the spacing, the buttons and the charts grow with it — so nothing gets cramped as it gets bigger.

It works alongside your browser’s own text size rather than fighting it, and the layout is measured in a way that follows both: a table that has room for six columns at the normal size folds to two lines at the large one instead of running off the side.

Less motion

If your system is set to reduce motion — macOS Reduce motion, Windows Show animations, the equivalent on Linux and Android — Ebbe stops animating. Panels appear instead of sliding, the switches flip instead of gliding, and nothing cross-fades.

Colour and contrast

Colour never carries a meaning on its own. Income above the line and spending below it are a position as well as a colour; the categorical colours on the analysis screen are paired with a dash pattern in the charts that use lines; the warning on a month below your buffer is a triangle and a sentence, not a red tint.

Every colour pair was checked against the surface behind it in both the dark and the light theme. Under Windows’s high-contrast mode Ebbe hands the colours back to the operating system rather than insisting on its own.

What is not there yet

Worth knowing before you rely on it:

• Nobody who uses a screen reader daily has tested Ebbe. It has been tested with a screen reader, which is not the same thing.
• A chart can only be read as its table. There is no way to move through the drawing itself with the keyboard.
• The manual has not been checked against a plain-language standard.

If something is in your way

Write to the address on the accessibility statement and say what you were trying to do and what happened instead. Something that stops you using Ebbe is a fault like any other, and it is treated as one.