Accessibility

bromigOS has two accessibility settings:

• Motion: how much the desktop moves. Choose full, reduced or still.
• Contrast: how strongly colours stand out. Choose normal or high.

Both work with every theme, your own included. A change shows at once.

Change motion or contrast

1. Open Settings › Accessibility (Super+,).
2. Under motion, choose Full, Reduced or Still.
3. Turn High contrast on or off.

The page also shows how your theme’s colours measure against contrast guidelines.

Other ways:

• The menu. Open TOGGLE and choose Reduced motion, Still background or High contrast.

• A terminal:

  bromigos accessibility                  # what's set, and how your theme's colours measure
  bromigos accessibility motion reduced   # full, reduced or still
  bromigos accessibility contrast high    # normal or high
  bromigos accessibility check mire       # measure a theme's colours, normal and high
  

  a11y is a shorter name for the same command: bromigos a11y motion still.

• The first run asks both questions.

Motion

Full

Everything moves as designed.

Reduced

The same desktop, calmer. The animated background keeps its look and its life, at less than half the speed. It loses what can trouble your eyes or your balance:

• the background no longer shifts as you move the mouse;
• nothing flickers, blinks or flashes: no lightning, no bursts of static;
• lights hold steady. A coding agent that needs you glows brighter instead of blinking;
• nothing spins, and no craft cross the sky.

Also:

• unlocking and logging in fade in, with no static and no sudden black;
• windows and workspaces fade instead of sliding;
• the animations inside GTK apps are off;
• holograms don’t drift on their own.

Still

Everything in Reduced, and the background holds still, like a photograph. It’s drawn again only when something it shows changes, such as an agent starting or finishing, the weather, the hour or your homelab’s health, or once a minute. Windows don’t animate at all.

High contrast

High contrast makes every colour in your theme stronger. On a dark theme, backgrounds get deeper, and text, lines and the selected item get brighter.

• Text reaches a contrast of at least 7:1, and quieter labels at least 4.5:1.
• Each colour keeps its hue, so the theme still looks like itself.
• The bar, the menus, notifications and the terminal become solid instead of see-through.
• Window borders get wider.
• The panels lose their glow.

The painted scenery of the worlds, the login screen and the start-up screen keep their own colours.

Screen reader

The bromigOS USB stick can start with spoken output, for installing. See The install stick.

Your settings file

Your choices are in ~/.config/bromigos/accessibility.toml. Updates don’t overwrite it.