Accessibility
A private photo vault is used by people who cannot afford to get it wrong. If a screen reader does not say which photo is selected, or reads a warning in the same voice as a reassurance, someone deletes the wrong thing. So accessibility here is part of the security work, not polish on top of it.
What the app supports
| VoiceOver | Every screen can be read and used by touch, keyboard, braille and speech. Each album, photo and setting is one element with a plain label: a photo reads its caption, then its date, then whether it is the album cover, edited or selected. A photo's description, written by you or assembled on the device, is read in place of the picture. Swiping, selecting, moving and deleting are named actions, never gestures alone. Changes that happen without focus moving — a copy, a sync finishing, a photo arriving — are announced. |
|---|---|
| Voice Control | Every control has a spoken name, so "tap Import from Photos" and "tap Lock Now" work. Photo tiles are buttons as well as images, so they can be opened and selected by name. |
| Larger Text | The whole interface follows Dynamic Type up to the largest accessibility sizes, with layouts that reflow rather than clip. Toolbars drop their captions at the largest sizes and keep their symbols, which are still spoken. |
| Dark Interface | A dark theme, a light theme, or either on a schedule you set. The photo viewer is always on near-black, whichever theme is on. |
| Differentiate Without Color | Nothing is told by color alone. Selection uses a checkmark in a square, the privacy report marks guarantees, notes and limits with different symbols, and errors have words. |
| Sufficient Contrast | Text and controls meet the contrast levels Apple's guidelines ask for in both themes, and Increase Contrast strengthens the hairlines and secondary text further. |
| Reduced Motion | With Reduce Motion on, nothing slides, scales or spins: the sync icon pulses instead of turning, sheets fade, and the photo pager moves without animation. Reduce Transparency removes the glass effects behind toolbars. |
| Hardware keyboard | On an iPad with a keyboard, the common actions have shortcuts: ⌘I to import, ⌘N for a new album, ⇧⌘A to select. |
What is still being worked on
Recorded here rather than quietly left:
- The crop frame in the editor can be moved and resized as a whole with VoiceOver, but its four corner handles are not individually focusable, so a precise crop is harder than it should be.
- Each card of the guided tour is read as one element. That is right for a summary, but there is no way to re-hear one sentence of it.
- The app adds no image descriptions of its own beyond the one-line description it can assemble on the device. VoiceOver's built-in image descriptions work on vault photos as on any other.
Languages
The app and this site are in seventeen languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Polish, Turkish, Russian, Japanese, Korean, and Simplified and Traditional Chinese. The app follows the language set on your device and never asks for, or reports, which one that is. The passcode and erase warnings are the kind of text where a wrong word costs someone their photos, so if a sentence reads wrongly in your language, tell us and it will be fixed.
This website
These pages are plain HTML with no scripts, one stylesheet, a skip link, and headings in order. They follow your system's light or dark setting and your browser's text size, and every image on the home page has a written description. If something here does not work with your screen reader or browser, that is a bug.
Tell us
If something in the app or on this site does not work for you, write to hello@brasskey.app and say which screen, which setting and what happened. There is no account for us to look up, so that description is everything we have to go on, and it is enough.