Accessibility

Adapt Exempla to the way you work

Exempla provides light and dark themes, a high-contrast style, visible text labels, standard keyboard commands, and system-aware controls. This page distinguishes verified support from areas that still require formal accessibility testing.

9 min
Test this guide

Mode and High Contrast are separate controls

The moon or sun button changes between Light and Dark mode. The contrast button independently turns High Contrast on or off, so you can test both Light High Contrast and Dark High Contrast.

Fixed accessible colours

The guide does not offer accent-colour selection. High Contrast uses black and white foundations, dark blue links in Light mode, and cyan links with yellow focus outlines in Dark mode.

More than colour

Links are underlined, selected navigation has a thick edge and inverted fill, controls have stronger borders, and keyboard focus has a three-pixel outline.

Opaque surfaces

High Contrast removes transparency and decorative colour gradients from the header and navigation surfaces.

Independent choices

Changing Light or Dark does not turn High Contrast off. Turning High Contrast off returns to the same Light or Dark mode.

Choose a style, theme, and contrast level

Open Appearance… from the Exempla menu or from the K menu in the left rail. Changes preview immediately. Choose OK to keep them or Cancel to restore the previous appearance.

Classic

An opaque, restrained interface with the standard Exempla visual structure.

Aurora

A more atmospheric interface with translucent surfaces. Use Classic or Clarity if transparency reduces readability.

Clarity (High Contrast)

An opaque high-contrast style with a fixed blue accent. Custom accent controls are disabled so contrast remains predictable.

Light or Dark

Each visual style can use a light or dark theme. Choose the one that produces less glare and clearer text for you.

Important states are accompanied by text, shapes, checkmarks, counts, or labels. Colour is not intended to be the only way to identify the current workspace, a selected option, an update notice, or a completed status.

Use operating-system scaling for the full interface

Whole application

Exempla does not yet provide an application-wide font-size control. Use macOS or Windows display scaling to enlarge menus, labels, tables, and controls together.

Transcript view

Use the minus, percentage, and plus controls in Transcript view to decrease, reset, or increase transcript text in 10 percent steps. Zoom changes the display, not the saved text or logical line numbers.

Exports

CSV and Excel exports can be opened in another application that provides its own zoom, font, and assistive-reading controls.

Use standard commands where they are available

The macOS menu bar and the Windows in-window menu share the same actions. Standard shortcuts cover New, Open, Save, Save As, Undo, Redo, Cut, Copy, Paste, Select All, Find in Transcription, and Full Screen. See the complete keyboard shortcut table.

Concordance

Enter opens an occurrence. Space checks or unchecks highlighted rows. Escape removes highlighting. Select All checks all results.

Clipboard

Delete or Backspace removes highlighted rows after the table has focus.

Transcript Find

Enter moves forward through matches. Shift+Enter moves backward.

Lists and tables

Standard arrow, Page Up, Page Down, Home, and End navigation is available where supported by the native control.

Use structure as well as colour

1Confirm the heading

Use column names such as Speaker, Token, Source, and Line instead of relying only on position or highlight colour.

2Reduce the visible task

Use a precise Active selection, query, filter, or minimum frequency so fewer irrelevant rows compete for attention.

3Open the source

Open a Concordance or Clipboard occurrence in Transcript view when a shortened context window is difficult to interpret.

4Use pagination

Concordance and Clipboard show 1,000 rows per page, with explicit page and result-range text in the footer.

Attention animation

The update sparkle can be dismissed

When an update is available, a sparkle travels around the K button after the application has settled, then pauses before appearing again. The adjacent Update available text communicates the same information without relying on motion or colour.

Use the close control beside the notice and choose Remind me later to hide it for one day, or Skip this version to hide that release. Exempla does not yet provide a global Reduce Motion preference.

Verify your essential workflow before beginning a large project

Many controls use native Qt roles, visible labels, accessible names, and standard shortcuts. However, complete VoiceOver and Windows screen-reader behaviour has not yet been formally audited. If you depend on a screen reader, voice control, switch control, magnification, or a keyboard-only workflow, test the operations you need with a small non-confidential project first.

1
Import a short file

Confirm that the import review and speaker-code decisions are understandable.

2
Run a small search

Confirm that focus, table headings, selection, and source opening work with your tools.

3
Export and reopen

Verify that the exported CSV or workbook is usable in your preferred application.

Report an accessibility problem

Include the Exempla version, operating system version, appearance and theme, display scaling, assistive technology and version, workspace, exact control or command, what you expected, and what happened. A screenshot is useful for a visual issue. For screen-reader issues, include the spoken output if it does not reveal confidential data.

Do not attach research transcripts or identifying participant information unless you are authorized to share them.