Accessibility
Spleen follows the accessibility settings you have already chosen in your operating system or browser. There is nothing to switch on here, and no separate accessible mode to find. If you have asked your system for more contrast or less motion, Spleen listens.
Contrast
Body text, muted text such as timestamps and hints, focus rings, and the outlines around text fields are all checked against the WCAG AA contrast levels: 4.5 to 1 for text, and 3 to 1 for controls and their outlines. Each of the four themes is checked separately, in both light and dark mode, because a colour that reads well in one does not always read well in another.
If you ask your system for more contrast, Spleen firms up further. Panel and sidebar edges strengthen, muted text goes past the AA level to 7 to 1, and quiet marks such as the quotation bar and the horizontal rule become clearly visible. The theme keeps its character: only the strength changes, not the colour.
Where to find this setting:
- macOS: System Settings → Accessibility → Display → Increase contrast
- Windows: Settings → Accessibility → Contrast themes
- iOS and iPadOS: Settings → Accessibility → Display & Text Size → Increase Contrast
- Android: Settings → Accessibility → Text and display → High contrast text
Motion
If you ask your system to reduce motion, Spleen removes the travel from its interface. Dialogs, menus, and popovers fade in where they belong instead of sliding or zooming into place. Panels open and close without unfolding. Jumping to an annotation or a search result moves the view instantly rather than gliding to it.
Fading and colour changes stay, because they carry no movement and keep the interface from snapping about. Loading spinners keep turning, since a spinner that has stopped looks like a problem rather than a courtesy.
Where to find this setting:
- macOS: System Settings → Accessibility → Display → Reduce motion
- Windows: Settings → Accessibility → Visual effects → Animation effects
- iOS and iPadOS: Settings → Accessibility → Motion → Reduce Motion
- Android: Settings → Accessibility → Remove animations
Keyboard
The writing workspace can be driven from the keyboard. See Keyboard Shortcuts for the full list, including the shortcuts for inline and block formatting, moving between documents, and the workspace panels.
Reordering your project does not require a mouse. Reorder mode has its own keyboard path for moving an item up or down, moving it out of or into a section, and collapsing sections as you go. Those keys are listed under Reorder mode on the same page.
Screen readers
When a save fails, Spleen announces it, so you are not left to notice a small change in the header. When the save recovers, it says so too.
Routine saving is deliberately silent. Autosave settles constantly while you write, and announcing every cycle would talk over the work rather than support it. Silence here means saving is proceeding normally.
Themes and reading comfort
Spleen offers four themes, each in a light and a dark version, and can follow your system’s light or dark setting rather than being fixed to one. See Appearance for how to choose.
You can also change the typeface you write in. Preferences → Editor settings → Editor font family offers Atkinson Hyperlegible alongside the default Literata and Inter. Atkinson Hyperlegible was designed by the Braille Institute to make letters easier to tell apart, which helps if you find similar letterforms such as I, l, and 1 run together.
The layout reflows when you zoom your browser, so enlarging the page does not push the workspace out of reach.
If something is in your way
This page describes what Spleen does today, not everything it should do. If a part of Spleen is hard or impossible for you to use, that is worth telling us about, and it is treated as a fault rather than a request. See Contact Support and Report a Bug.